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Google set to kill passwords by end of this year with ‘Project Abacus’

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Google is set to begin testing a new login method which replaces passwords with a ‘trust-based’ system which monitors the way you typically use your phone.

The ‘Trust API’, part of ‘Project Abacus’, was unveiled at Google’s I/O developer conference, and is set to be tested by a number of large financial institutions in June, the Guardian reports.

The system is designed to be used on smartphones, and works by constantly checking for a number of personal indicators which can grant access to accounts or the phone itself.

Instead of asking for a password, the phone mightanalyse your face, your voice, how you type, how you swipe, how you move and where you are. All of these bits of data are fed into the API, which then generates a ‘trust score’ which indicates how likely it is that it’s actually you carrying the phone.

The idea is to make devices more secure. Someone could easily steal a password, but it would be much harder for them to mimic the unique way someone else uses their phone. Google believes a login system based on a combination of these factors could be 10 times more secure than a fingerprint scan.

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