Snoopers won鈥檛 stand a chance if you enter your PIN using only eye movements.
A system that uses infrared light to track the position of your eyes as you look at numbers and letters displayed on a screen could soon make that possible. 鈥淲hile it is simple to look over someone鈥檚 shoulder to tell what keys they are pressing, it鈥檚 harder to tell exactly where on the screen the user is looking,鈥� says Manu Kumar, who helped create the system, called EyePassword, at Stanford University in California.
EyePassword works by shining an invisible infrared beam on the user鈥檚 face. That produces a reflection or 鈥済lint鈥� in their eye that stays in the same spot no matter where they look, in contrast to their pupils, which move whenever their gaze shifts. A camera tracks the relative positions of the glint and the person鈥檚 pupils and uses this to work out what they are looking at. When tested on 18 users, mistakes occurred just 3 per cent of the time. However, it took 10 seconds to enter passwords about eight characters long, compared to just 2.5 seconds by typing.
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A previous attempt at preventing 鈥渟houlder surfing鈥� used . Users had to select the part of a screen where a picture they had previously chosen was displayed, among a bunch of other images. But Kumar found that people liked the familiarity of alphanumeric passwords and PINs.
Security specialist Paul Dunphy of the University of Newcastle, UK, now wants to see how EyePassword fares when users are 鈥渋n a busy street, with a queue of people behind them鈥�.
