Your Heartbeat Could Become Your Password. Futurism!

This is some science-fiction boner time right here. A team at  National Chung Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan have translated a human heartbeat into an encryption key. Stealing someone’s password is about to get pretty messy. Puns! Aha!

Gizmodo:

A technology in the works might soon allow you to unlock your hard drive by simply touching your keyboard. Your unique heartbeat, emitted through your fingertip, would be your password.

Chun-Liang Lin and his team at the National Chung Hsing University in Taichung, Taiwan translated a human heartbeat into an encryption key using an electrocardiograph reading from an individual’s palm. Their unique series of thump-thumpa generated a secret key.

The part that blows my mind is that your heartbeat is  so  unique that that pattern never actually repeats. You will never get the same exact timing of beats twice. So the encryption scheme is based on the math behind chaos theory, which dictates that outcomes are highly sensitive to initial conditions, leading to widely divergent outcomes (it’s sometimes referred to as the butterfly effect). The research will appear in an upcoming issue of  Information Sciences.  If they’re going to create a product, they better hurry up if they want to beat Apple, where engineers seem to have been  working on something similar  since at least 2010.

This is goddamn insane.