Wearable devices could use your breathing patterns like a password

By Chris Stokel-Walker

Wearable electronic devices, such as earphones and smartwatches, are currently paired to smartphones and similar tech through a secure Bluetooth or near-field communication (NFC) link – but they could also soon be paired securely by the way you breathe.

Jafar Pourbemany at Cleveland State University and his colleagues have developed a protocol that can create a 256-bit encryption key every few seconds – around one human breathing cycle – based on the way a user …