[Part 3, The How] : Turning fond memories into Master Passwords.

Imagine if a single, favorite memory could manage all your passwords for you.

This is Part 3, of the 3 part series featuring personal cybersecurity challenges for most internet users. These parts are :

1. The What (link) – What is the state of personal cybersecurity for the average internet user and what keeps the barrier to entry for your cybersecurity, so high ? We explore the current state of personal cybersecurity.
2. The Why (link) – Why has personal cybersecurity become so difficult ? We go over all of the risks that an average internet user faces and try to understand why is the current state of personal cybersecurity in the shape it is today.
3. The How (this post) – To solve this massive problem. We will have to come up with new ways of approaching cybersecurity. The the current “how“, is not good enough.

Fond Memories – those you love to remember.

The place you had your first date at, or the place where mom loves to go out for dinner; all of these are memories that we can remember naturally. Such natural memories are “saved” into our minds, effortlessly. These are the most natural things we will want to remember. This is because we capture visual and audio-graphic clues naturally and it takes almost no effort to remember things that we experience with our visual and hearing senses. If we can turn human vision and audiographic memory into a master password, that is what we will love to remember.

Your fond memories, can never be stolen

Another great thing about our memories is that they are private, and cannot be stolen since they do not have any physical form. Unless you want to share or explain the memory to someone else, it remains with you, and only with you. Forever. Nobody else can access them, nobody can even know what they are. Your memories will also be different and unique compared to everybody else.

So your fond memories are :

• Private
• Secure
• Unique

…and these are the exact same features that we want from our passwords. But as we’ve discussed in Part 2 of this series, remembering passwords is extremely unnatural as it is based on the concept of forceful remembrance of strings (such as special characters, upper/lower case, numbers etc). On the other hand, our favorite memories are things that are vivid, clear and we love the experience of remembering them.

Sharing and turning vision memories into Master Passwords.

The human brain can hold 2.5 Petabytes of digital-equivalent-memory, so the storage capacity of our brains is never a problem. The only problem (before PicKey.ai came along), was that the capability to use vivid visual memories stored in the brain, and link them into software so that they can be your private, secure and unique identity; wasn’t available.

I briefly touch upon the process of converting biological memory, into digital memory in this blog post, where we discuss how you can turn anything that you see, into a unique, computer generated memory that mimics human photographic memory. Visual memories are vivid, clear, often have an audio-graphic input too, which makes it a breeze to remember them. In-fact, we love to remember such great experiences.

The next section talks about how we created a new master-login system that can use artificial intelligence to remember and can use 3D/augmented reality to verify a memory that you share with this system. Since memories are private, unique and secure; we created a digital copy of it, which then becomes your private memory that you can use to log-in to this system.

Technology should be for people, not the other way round.

User experience matters. That is the primary reason why it is hard to do cybersecurity. It is even harder to get people to use cybersecurity products, especially for personal use. This is mainly due to the fact that in order to do cybersecurity right, the products of today have a steep learning curve and need significant amount of motivation and know-how for the average user to be able to even use them; resulting in a terrible user experience. In fact, it is not an “experience” at all. After years of research, development, several pending patents, and a lot of careful architectural decisions into the new master-login system, we think we may have just solved the motivation, usability and most importantly – the experience problem for everybody.

What is this new Master Login?

We’ve invented a mechanism where you login on your phone, once; and that too, using your visual and audio memory. With this single login, you can then control your entire digital life – all of your passwords, credit cards, addresses, phones etc etc. A single vivid, immersive memory that can become your identity on this system.

How does it work?

This new system performs multi-factor authentication (multiple verification). These are :

1. Show something to PicKey.ai . PicKey will turn this vision into a permanent memory and remember it similar to how a human would. Simply put, you can turn your living room into a vision based memory. Lets call it the “vision secret”.
2. You select a character out of thousands of available options. This character is often going to be animated and is going to appear (poof..!) in front of you, in 3D or Augmented Reality (AR). It will only be visible to you inside your phone and nobody else will know about it. We call it, the “keymoji secret”. As an example, we’ve highlighted the 3D/AR character with a yellow tint in the picture above.

When both the secrets match, you log-in to PicKey.ai with a Master Login. Since PicKey.ai is a password manager and an online vault, it then takes over and manages, auto-fills all of your passwords and other information for you.

PicKey remembers the place, and verifies the character before you login. This is the only login you’d have to perform, since PicKey will manage all other logins and accounts for you as your Password Manager. The same concept works for a Face based login too.

In practice, you can login to your account using multiple Master Passwords – like your living room and your office and your face, all of them can be Master Passwords at the same time, and you can login to PicKey using any of them.

Is Place Login better than Face Login?

Since you just need to login once, Master Login with a place is generally more secure as your choice of the place is entirely anonymous and known only to you. Face based logins have a drawback that you’ve got just one face, and everyone knows it already. PicKey saves the image of the place/face that was used to login on your phone, in case you want to login later from that image your phone’s photo library.

Memory or a Picture?
The Vision Secret is based on the concept of visual memory and not just about a single picture of an object/place/face. If someone says “Statue of Liberty”, you can simply visualize the Statue of Liberty in your mind, with very high accuracy; without even looking at a picture of it. The Visual Secret is based on this concept of visual memory, and is not limited to a single picture of something.

When Passwords have Personalities

If a single, master-login is all you need, it better be a memorable one. PicKey lets you add immersive gamification and customization into your Master Login. You decide the memories you want to make, and customize them they way you want. When Master Login becomes a visual and audio treat to watch, is immersive, customizable and secure; that is when we say Cybersecurity can be really built for people, naturally.

With PicKey.ai, we believe that the time to live password free, is finally here.

References

https://pickey.ai