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Your Heartbeat Can Give Away Your Identity, Like a Fingerprint
Our heartbeats differ just enough to tell us apart, but they also give away potentially sensitive information
Heartbeats, like our fingerprints and faces, are unique. The distinctive waveforms generated by a heart’s expansions and contractions differ just enough from person to person that they can be used to tell us apart. That means heartbeats could serve as a biometric — a unique physiological characteristic that can be used to identify a person. Some scientists think a heartbeat could be a better identifier than the fingerprints we use to unlock phones today.
Startups today make unobtrusive heart monitors that can detect drowsiness behind the wheel of a car or offer perpetual user authentication in high-security manufacturing facilities. These monitors could eventually replace fingerprint scanners on smartphones, or the key fobs we use to enter office buildings.
“As a security researcher, absolutely, I would pick ECG over fingerprint scanners or basically anything else that we use at the moment,” Simon Eberz, a research associate with the University of Oxford’s department of computer science, tells OneZero.
But authentication via heartbeat comes with its own unique privacy concerns, not…
