Engineers devised a way to send passwords through your body instead of air read more at here www.spinonews.com/index.php/item/1046-engineers-devised-a-way-to-send-passwords-through-your-body-instead-of-air

University of Washington computer scientists and electrical engineers have devised a way to send secure passwords through the human body using benign, low-frequency transmissions generated by fingerprint sensors and touch pads on consumer devices.

Shyam Gollakota, UW assistant professor of computer science and engineering, said, “Fingerprint sensors have so far been used as an input device. What is cool is that we’ve shown for the first time that fingerprint sensors can be re-purposed to send out information that is confined to the body”.

This new technique, which leverages the signals already generated by fingerprint sensors on smartphones and laptop touchpads to transmit data in new ways

The team tested the technique on iPhone and other fingerprint sensors. In tests with 10 different subjects, they were able to generate usable on-body transmissions on people of different heights, weights and body types. The system also worked when subjects were in motion.

The research team from the UW’s Networks and Mobile Systems Lab found that, fingerprint sensors and touch pads generate signals in the 2 to 10 megahertz range and employ capacitive coupling sense is in space, and identify the ridges and valleys that form unique fingerprint patterns.

Generally, these signals receive input about your finger. However, the UW engineers devised a way to use these signals as output that corresponds to the data contained in a password or access code.

After signals entered on a smartphone that authenticates your identity can travel securely through your body to a receiver embedded in a device that needs to confirm who you are.

Their process employs a sequence of finger scans to encode and transmit data. Performing a finger scan correlates to a 1-bit of digital data and not performing the scan correlates to a 0-bit.

The technology could also be useful for secure key transmissions to medical devices such as glucose monitors or insulin pumps, which seek to confirm someone’s identity before sending or sharing data.

The team achieved bit rates of 50 bits per second on laptop touch pads and 25 bits per second with fingerprint sensors fast enough to send a simple password or numerical code through the body and to a receiver within seconds.