Sensor-based Authentication

As abstract as it may sound as a concept, authentication is one of the main activities in our daily life. Be it swiping a finger in a certain pattern across the smartphone´s touch screen, writing money or merely opening the door to our flat. Preventing unauthorized access to one´s bank account is critical. And the same holds true for online accounts in order to protect our identity, just to name a few examples. It all starts with successful identification, but in order to also authenticate, a reliable verification is required. The most common tool to verify one´s identity is using a password.
Yet, in all these increasingly digital and internet-based interactions, the balance between security and convenience is hard to find. How many passwords can we expected to remember? How complex should they be? Should we use unique physical items to increase security? How can we avoid spending more energy on the log-in than on the actual activity? Such questions represent a growing customer pain - which should ultimately result in opportunities for profitable business models. And this growing customer pain is not necessarily limited to our private life - reliable authentication is at least as critical in business transactions and at industrial sites.
This is where we come in: our team at Siemens Novel Businesses founds start-ups in business areas of potential interest for Siemens, a global engineering powerhouse. "Sensor-based authentication" is one of these areas of potential interest, where a promising development seems to start in the consumer space and could spread to industrial applications later.