Some companies try to help us out and make the login process into mobile phones and other devices easier – the most recent example being Yahoo with its ideas of using you ear and knuckles to do so. It sounds cool, but will it help you getting rid of the good old password altogether? Probably not.

Researchers believe that a very personalized authentication process could help out though. It would be a bit creepy if your smartphone asked you “Which YouTube-Video did you watch yesterday evening”, but at the same time it would also be pretty secure.  Romit Roy Choudhury, an associate professor at the University of Illinois who researched the topic and wrote a paper on it, says: “Whenever there’s something you and your phone share and no one else knows, that’s a secret, and that can be used as a key.”

There are some drawbacks though:

• We all have horrible memories. To actually work, the event apparently has to be unique enough to jog our memory, and not much older than a day.
• Good friends might be able to predict some of the answers (and consequently your password).

Overall the results were not bad. The study showed that the password prompt works well enough – users were able to answer three questions correctly 95% of the time.

For more information head over to the article from MIT Technology Review.

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