Recent hacks and security breaches keep pressing home the need for everyone to be more vigilant about personal security, but could we use our own devices to help us do that?
“Cortana, please change all my passwords.”
“I’d be happy to. Do you have new specific passwords in mind or would you like me to pick them for you?”
“Oh, I don’t care. You pick new ones for me.”
“No problem. Just give me a few moments to log into all your accounts using your old passwords and I’ll change them…Okay, I’m finished. All your passwords have been changed to unique, 32-character, alpha-numeric, random sequences. Is there anything else I can do for you?”
“Can you email me a list of the new passwords?”
“Certainly, but you don’t really need them since I can remember them all for you.”
“But what if I lose my phone?”
“I can access this phone’s kill switch for you, if you like.”
“But aren’t you saved on my phone?”
“I don’t live in your phone. I live in the cloud. You can always reach me using any device that can connect to the internet. Once I know it’s you I can access all your data.”
“But, how will you know it’s me?”
“I know you pretty well. I have your voice patterns. Your fingerprints. I even keep track of how quickly you type and how fast you text. These things alone let me identify you with a 99.9993% degree of accuracy. And now that you have a smart watch I can even use biometrics to help identify you. Every time you use your phone I check all these things to make sure it’s really you and I am constantly refining these tests as time goes by to make them even more accurate. In fact, I use all these things to generate a unique key that I use to encrypt all your data both on this phone and in the cloud. So a hacker would need to know your passwords, where you were at a dozen different points in time over the past six months, they would need to have your fingerprints and be able to duplicate your speech patterns and text or type exactly like you do. Oh, and they would need to know how fast your heart was beating yesterday after your work out. And I re-encrypt everything every few minutes based on new data, so even then it probably wouldn’t work.”
“Oh…um…thanks.”
“No problem. Oh and by the way, I can automatically change all your passwords every few minutes if you want me to, so you never need to ask me to change them again. Would you like me to do that for you?”
“Um…sure…thanks.”
“No problem.”
