Today I learned Motorola was once developing a password pill that turns your body into an authentication token: 'We have demoed this working and authenticating a phone'
Did you know that, for a brief few years, Motorola (or more accurately, Motorola Mobility) was owned by Google? If you didn't know that, then you likely also don't know that, in those two cursed years, Motorola showed off a password pill you swallow as a form of password authentication. Yeah, 2013 was weird.
As brought to my attention by Hackaday, this password pill would house a small chip that would dissolve in your stomach and emit an 18-bit ECG-style signal from your body. Regina Dugan, the then-research head at Motorola, said, "Essentially, your entire body becomes your authentication token."
Reportedly, one could have up to 30 of the pills every day, and they were apparently non-toxic, too. That's a relief.
According to All Things D, the only thing tests could determine was whether you had them. Then-Motorola head Dennis Woodside said “This isn’t stuff that’s going to ship anytime soon, but I think having the boldness to think differently about problems that everybody has every day is really important for Motorola now.”
Motorola Mobility would be sold to Lenovo for $2.91 billion a year after this declaration. This was just under $10 billion less than Google paid two years prior, though it reportedly put those funds into the company for its portfolio of patents.
The password pill was being worked on with a company called Proteus Digital Health, and it already had FDA approval for an ingestible sensor that could be used as a medical device. Naturally, being early on in development, we didn't get a price point or nutritional information for those yummy, yummy chips. However, Dugan did say, "We have demoed this working and authenticating a phone."
At the time, Motorola were also intent on 'fixing' the "mechanical mismatch between humans and electronics" with a password tattoo. Motorola was working on this alongside a company called MC10, which made stretchable circuits. Justifying this, Dugan said, “Electronics are boxy and rigid, and humans are curvy and soft.”
Continuing on, and definitely not sounding like a tech super villain, Dugan said, “it means that my arms are like wires, my hands are like alligator clips — when I touch my phone, my computer, my door, my car, I’m authenticated in. It’s my first superpower. I want that.”
Or you can just get a password manager. They're really good… I've been told. I wouldn't know, as I just write my passwords on my arm and hope they don't rub off in the night, potentially leaving me without access to my MySpace page forever. The horror.