Google plans to kill passwords by end of this year with 'Project Abacus'

At last year's developer conference, Google revealed it plans to get rid of passwords in favor Project Abacus, that uses machine intelligence to verify user's identity based on various patterns. At this year's I/O, Dan Kaufman, Director of Google's ATAP team revealed more details about Project Abacus.

To recall, Project Abacus was seen as an improvement over two-factor authentication. Google said that passwords and PINs are hard to remember and the new sign-in system is aimed at learning users patterns like typing, walking, location and more to verify user identity and unlock the device.   

TechCrunch reports that Kaufman has confirmed that with Project Abacus, users will be able to unlock a device or sign-in to an app based on "Trust Score", which is calculated based on various user patterns.

Adding more details about Project Abacus, Kaufman said ", "We have a phone, and these phones have all these sensors in them. Why couldn't it just know who I was, so I don't need a password? I should just be able to work.". He also said that engineers at Google have turned the 'Trust Score' to Trust API. 

Google will be testing the Trust API with several financial institutions next month, and if all goes well, it show become available to Android developers by the end of this year.  

Via