Do you sleep well knowing your ever-expanding password arsenal protects your bank app, your work account, Steam, and whatever else makes up your digital life? You think you are safe with two-factor authentication and all that jazz.
Only careless people get hacked, right? They’re the ones whose accounts get hijacked for who-knows-what, while you? You have crafted a super complex password—dozens of symbols and numbers make it impossible even to pronounce. I bet you think no hacker can crack your obscure logic.
Now tell me: how do you store your rock-solid passwords? Do you rely on one weak master password to unlock the vault, because you don’t want to forget that one and lose everything?
Picture a hacker thinking: “Oh yeah, 100–500 characters in the password? No way I’m cracking that…Wait, where is it stored? In a password manager? And there it is, the password is 1234, LOL!”
If you recognize yourself, don’t panic—at least not too much. AI may soon take us to a new level of security and speed up authorization and authentication.
Big claims? Let me explain the nitty-gritty.
Verification, the Blade Runner Way
A quick refresher on the terms: authorization implies understanding you can use a particular service, while authentication is gaining rights and access within the authorized service. Imagine you want to play a game, so you log in, but you can only do what you’re allowed to do.
How can AI be helpful? Blade Runner imagined a future with a test to reveal whether an individual was a human. In the real world, this idea has a name. Do you know what it is?
Deep Psychological Analysis of Personality
This process involves gathering data on users’ emotional reactions, behavior patterns, personality traits, and even cognitive habits. Think about your friend who hates pineapple on pizza—you know more than just that. That choice might depend on their mood and the kind of day they’re having. What you do here, almost unconsciously, is what AI gets trained to do deliberately, namely, psychometric analysis.
Psychometric analysis is a subset of psychological analysis and encompasses several methods. For example, the Big Five or MBTI attempts to classify people into different personality types. These methods are already actively used in recruitment, marketing, and security technology.
Psychologists at the University of Virginia conducted a study in 2014 to assess how good people are at hiding their true feelings when tested using computer programs. The programs accurately determined whether a person was aggressive or prone to stress based on their linguistic patterns and emotional responses, and—a cool thing—one of the studies predicted that our behaviors on social media and the reviews we write could help computers assess us with greater accuracy.
Another line of research, psycho-physiological authentication, assessed a person’s behavior and emotions along with physiology, such as pulse and galvanic skin response (in other words, when you sweat while talking about your ex). This analysis can help create highly secure authentication systems.
When the Future and Sci-Fi Shake Hands
Imagine an AI-powered system that will authenticate you using your character, mood, language, and reactions to stress. For example, if you always respond with “well, okay” to any inconvenient topic, the system will notice your reaction and categorize it as part of your personality. If you get nervous and type back fast in a messenger, the system will detect signs of stress and, as a result, request additional verification. Such a system will also be able to read your texts and analyze the general patterns in how you perceive information.
Setting the Technical Aspects
To make such a system work in the future, you would have to complete the following:
- Collect data. Whether it’s text messages, voice recordings, mouse movements, or typing speed—all data types will undergo the analysis needed to create your personality profile.
- Train the machine. Make sure the system uses a neural network capable of analyzing behavior and correlating it with the psychoanalysis a person undergoes online (or in real life). These systems are increasingly predicting the emotions most likely to occur in response to different events.
- Evaluate and verify. You wouldn’t like your laptop to decide you’re upset and hand you a psych evaluation, would you? Consider multiple layers of verification to ensure the system identifies you as human, not as an android. Combine psychological analysis with traditional biometric methods (like fingerprints or facial recognition).
The Price of Knowing You Well
As with anything that feels like magic, AI-driven authentication will come with a few unsettling trade-offs.
What you will get:
- The system will adapt to you automatically, making your authentication as personalized as possible.
- Forget about annoying passwords, PINs, and SMS codes—just your behavior.
- Potentially, such a system will be far more secure than today’s standard passwords.
What it will cost you:
- Too much personal data could be used for manipulation.
- More privacy issues will arise (imagine a system testing emotional reactions right after you’ve received bad news).
- Implementing such a system will require a resource-heavy computing infrastructure and robust data protection.
Are You “You” Enough to Log In?
Technology is already using psychological aspects in data analysis. What once felt like a futuristic concept in Blade Runner—deep psychological analysis—now reads more like a roadmap. This concept could become central to how we handle secure authentication and access, but for now, it still requires research and experimentation. Perhaps in the near future, the system will ask you, “What did you feel at that moment?” to prove you’re a human, not another robot stealing your place.
