Google is now launching numerous security-based projects in order to provide its users with a greater level of security.
Among these projects in the search giant's Project Abacus, which the company claims will soon make the use of passwords obsolete, Free Malaysia Today reported.
Google has been working with 33 universities on trials for Abacus since last year, allowing it to collect a total of 40 terabytes of data across 28 different states. The project's level of security compared to old-fashioned email and password combinations, however, was not revealed, according to 9 to 5 Google.
The company demonsrtated in a video at this year's I/O Conference how, using a login screen, Abacus is able to measure and score different factors that can later determine if the person holding the device is the owner or not. Factors include location, face, voice, typing pattern, connected devices and password. Once those scores are collected, a trust score, which is basically a score of how confident the device is that the person holding the device is the owner, will be set by the app.
If Abacus successfully identifies you, you will be logged in automatically. If you do not pass the threshold set by the app, or if it does not trust you enough to believe that you are who you say you are, then the program goes back to asking for a password.
There is also a difference in the trust scores required per application. In other words, the trust score needed is higher when you are trying to access a bank account compared to the trust score needed when accessing a game.
Abacus is capable of providing more security than fingerprint detection and other biometric security methods because it doesn't just use one method of authentication that could be imitated, PC Advisor reported. Regina Dugan, head of Google's Advanced Technology and Project (ATAP), claims that Abacus is 10 times more secure than any fingerprint.
