In its aim to make online banking more secure, a British company launched an emoji alternative to the traditional four-digit pin code.
Intelligent Environments, a London-based company which provides banking software, claims that the Emoji Passcode service is more secure because there are more potential combinations of the 44 emojis than there are of the numbers 0-10.
"Why can't financial service be fun and innovative?" said David Webber, managing director of Intelligent Environments.
The idea of using emojis also appeals to 15 to 25-year-olds, but wasn't patented by the company.
Professor Alan Woodward, a cybersecurity expert, said that patterns and images were already used by some firms as a useful alternative to remembering complex sequences of numbers and letters, BBC News reported.
"I think this is an interesting and potentially valuable step forward," Woodward said, knowing that a hacker would need more permutations and combinations of emojis in order to get the password.
Alan Brown, a product development manager at Intelligent Environments revealed that emojis would have 3,498,308 password combinations compared to 7,290 permutations for a pin code, reported The Huffington Post.
Woodward added that a two-factor authentication would be necessary since hackers would look for a way through.
According to Business Insider, banks are already showing interest in the idea of using emoji passwords for online banking.
However, former memory champion Michael Tipper said that the technique for remembering a sequence of either numbers or pictures was essentially the same and cited that people are lazy and would choose an easier combination.
"Statistically it will be harder to crack - but if you're presented with a screen of emojis and you can't be bothered to remember a sequence you're going to pick the ones in the four corners or the top row - and then you are left with an equally insecure technology."
Tipper also stressed that the human behavior could be a potential security flaw of the proposed Emoji Passcode service.
