If remembering your phone's passcode is proving too much, some good news - you may be able to unlock your device with a doodle.
That's according to a team at Rutgers University, who say they've developed the first ever "free-form gesture passwords", which lets people draw their passwords in any shape or with any number of fingers. The system differs from current pattern-based unlock systems as it has a far greater number of combinations and variants.
The passwords are faster than traditional passwords, the team says, easy to remember but "harder to guess". Janne Lindqvist, who worked on the research, described phone hacking as a "serious issue", and said the doodling passwords could prevent criminals from accessing information including photos, online banking details and emails.
"If you get access to someone's smartphone, that can reveal their whole social network," he said. "People take photos with them. They might be just completely innocent photos of their family, but they might still not want them in the public. People do online banking with them."
91 participants in the study created 347 text passwords and 345 gesture passwords, completing over 2,000 logins during the research. The team found that not only did the participants save time using the gesture passwords - 22 percent less time logging in and 42 percent less time creating passwords - they also preferred them
Although the passwords currently only work on touchscreen phones, the team hope that it could be extended to touchscreen computers, or even "doors with touchscreens instead of swipe cards or locks".
Other teams have also sought to improve on traditional text passwords -- Israeli startup SlickLogin uses sound to authenticate passwords, and Swedish company BehavioSec uses a combination of the force of and speed of someone's typing and the angle at which they swipe touchscreens to create a "biometric fingerprint" for unlocking a phone.
This article was originally published by WIRED UK
