How particle accelerator maths helped me fix my Wi-Fi

"The things I do for my housemates' downloading habit..." Maths by Sergey Nivens/www.shutterstock.com

Electromagnetic radiation – it might sound like something that you’d be better off avoiding, but electromagnetic waves of various kinds underpin our senses and how we interact with the world – from the light emissions through which your eyes perceive these words, to the microwaves that carry the Wi-Fi signal to your laptop or phone on which you’re reading it.

More or less every form of modern communication is carried by electromagnetic waves. They whisk through the antenna on your car, travel through walls whenever you need to make a phone call inside, yet also inexplicably reflect from seemingly nothing in the Earth’s upper atmosphere.

This happens because the atmosphere becomes a plasma at high altitudes – a state of matter where atoms split apart and electrons are no longer bound to their parent nuclei. Plasmas have interesting properties, as they react very strongly to electromagnetic fields. In this case usefully: at low enough frequencies it becomes possible to bounce radio signals around the world, extending their range.

It’s the interesting interactions between high-powered electromagnetic waves and plasmas that my research group and I study. The most intense electromagnetic waves in the world are found in the form of high-power laser pulses. The UK hosts some of the most powerful laser systems in rural Oxfordshire, and the same idea of using electromagnetic waves to accelerate particles is used at the Large Hadron Collider in CERN.

It’s all in the maths

We can accurately predict the interactions of intense electromagnetic waves and plasmas, as the underlying physical processes are governed by Maxwell’s equations – one of the triumphs of 19th century physics that united electric and magnetic fields and demonstrated that light is a form of electromagnetic wave.

Solving Maxwell’s equations by hand can be tortuous, but it transpires that a clever algorithm invented in the 1960s and rediscovered since makes the exercise relatively simple given a sufficiently powerful computer.

Armed with the knowledge of Maxwell’s equations and how to solve them, I recently turned my attention to a much simpler but more widespread problem, that of how to simulate and therefore improve the Wi-Fi reception in my flat. While “sufficiently powerful” in an academic sense often means supercomputers with tens of thousands of processors running in parallel, in this case, the sufficiently powerful computer required to run the program turned out to be a smartphone.

The black circle represents the router, and the ‘hotter’ the colour the stronger the signal strength.

For this trick you will need one Maxwell

The electromagnetic radiation emanating from the antenna in your wireless router is caused by a small current oscillating at 2.4GHz (2.4 billion times per second). In my model I introduced a current like this and allowed it to oscillate, and Maxwell’s equations dictated how the resulting electromagnetic waves flow. By mapping in the actual locations of the walls in my flat, I was able to produce a map of the Wi-Fi signal strength which varied as I moved the virtual router.

The first lesson is clear, if obvious: Wi-Fi signals travels much more easily through free space than walls, so the ideal router position has line-of-sight to where you’ll be using it.

The waves spread and fill the flat, then settle into a ‘standing wave’.

Sometimes it appears that the waves have stopped changing, and instead flicker in the same places. This is the phenomenon of a standing wave, where Wi-Fi reflections overlap and cancel each other out. These dark spots on the map (or “not spots”) indicate a low Wi-Fi signal, and are separated by several centimetres. Recently, a fellow enthusiast managed to map this phenomenon in three dimensions, as explained in this video.

So the second lesson is less obvious and more interesting: if reception is poor in a particular position, even a slight change of the router’s position may produce significant improvement in signal strength, as any signal dark spots will also move.

101 uses for electromagnetic waves

After publishing my findings I was struck by the number of people eager to perform simulations of their own. Ever eager to spread the gospel of electromagnetism, I bundled the simulation into an Android app to provide others with a simulated electromagnetic wave-based solution to a common modern problem: where’s the best place for my Wi-Fi router?

Assuming few would be interested, I was surprised when news spread via social media and the several thousand copies of the app sold over the course of a few hours.

Sales have gradually dwindled but the message remains clear: not only are electromagnetic waves fascinating, mathematically elegant and supremely useful, they can make your life easier, your internet connection stronger, and even make you a bit of money too.

A crash with no obvious cause: we must wait for answers from Germanwings black box

Recovering the lost aircraft will be hampered by the terrain, snow and weather. EPA/Sebastien Nogier

An investigation has begun into the unexplained crash of Flight 4U9525, of budget airline Germanwings, which crashed into the Alps in southeastern France en route from Barcelona to Dusseldorf with the loss of all 150 passengers and crew.

The aircraft descended from cruising height of 38,000ft to around 6,000ft in eight minutes before air traffic control lost contact just before 11am. According to witnesses who saw the aircraft descend, there was no sign of smoke or in-flight explosion, and weather at the time was good. The black box flight recorder has been found, and will reveal more in time.

Such incidents are actually quite rare in statistical terms. Flight 4U9525 appears to have involved a major malfunction of some kind as the aircraft was cruising, while the majority of accidents occur during take-off or landing. In fact most air accidents that involve fatalities also result in a large proportion of the passengers surviving because they occur nearer the ground, a fact that is not generally appreciated but sadly also not the case here.

The abrupt end of the aircraft’s flight path over the Alps. EPA/ZIPI

The aircraft: Airbus A320

The aircraft, an Airbus A320, is a model that is in great demand from all parts of the world, and its reputation for safety and reliability is unequalled. It is one of a smaller, single-aisled family that comprise the A318, A319, A320 and A321, and has been in production since the late 1980s, and sales of the updated models show little sign of decline.

The A320 family has an accident rate of 0.14 fatal crashes per million departures, which is considered excellent. The total number of accident fatalities is below 1,500, which good considering its two decade service history and that more than 6,000 are in daily use.

There have been some memorable A320 accidents; in June 1988 an Air France airliner crash landed in high trees while performing a fly-by-wire landing at the Mulhouse air display in France. Three of the 136 passengers on board died, and airliners are no longer permitted to perform at airshows with passengers on board.

In January 2009, in a remarkable piece of airmanship a US Airways A320 taking off from La Guardia in New York had a double engine failure from birdstrikes and subsequently glided to a perfect ditching in the River Hudson. Of the 155 people on board there was only a single serious injury.

In this case it’s been reported that the particular aircraft involved was 24 years old, with the aircraft having previously been in service with German national airline Lufthansa before being transferred to Germanwings, a Lufthansa subsidiary. While this may surprise some, there’s little doubt that its full service records will show it was airworthy before its final departure, and that all necessary servicing had been completed in the years since manufacture. European airspace and flights are heavily audited by the European Aviation Safety Agency and are considered very safe. Lufthansa operates 100 A320s, Germanwings 60.

The A320 family were among the first so-called “fly-by-wire” airliners, a great innovation when they first flew. In simple terms, the cables and pulleys connecting the moveable flight control surfaces (elevators, rudder and ailerons) to the pilots' controls are replaced by electronic connections. These permit lighter pressure, swifter response, and better handling than previous manual systems, and do away with the image of “wrestling with the stick”. It’s now accepted that fly-by-wire technology, once the preserve of military aircraft, are perfectly safe for commercial use.

In-flight emergency

With regard to airborne emergencies it goes without saying that there are procedures for all eventualities, and that these are practised by aircrews on a very regular basis. In all cases, teaching on the impact of human factors dictates that one pilot physically flies the aircraft while another attempts to isolate or solve the problem using checklist procedures, and will advise the cabin crew and the air traffic authorities that an emergency exists.

So it’s puzzling to investigators that Flight 4U9525 issued no “mayday” distress call, as confirmed by France’s aviation authority despite earlier contradictory reports. This is unusual: if the situation was so catastrophic that it led to an immediate and rapid descent, for whatever reason, then possibly the aircraft or its communications systems had become disabled in some way. If it was cabin depressurisation that caused such a descent, each pilot has about 15 minutes of independent oxygen supply (the passengers have no more than 12 minutes' worth).

It’s tragic that even at the low altitude of around 6,000ft that the aircraft was unable to avoid colliding into the lower slopes of the Alps, and that all on board perished. What remains certain is that the air accident investigators will piece together Flight 4U9525’s final moments to assemble a true picture of what happened in the run up to the crash in an effort to prevent its re-occurrence. Sad though these events are, commercial air travel remains the safest form of travel in the 21st century, and is likely to remain so.

Breaking up is never easy -- and splitting BT won’t give us better broadband

BT is big... but a smaller BT won't necessarily be more beautiful. Nick Ansell/PA

There have frequently been calls from one side or another for BT, the former telecoms monopoly, to be broken up. Now, with BT having emerged as the buyer of mobile phone network EE, complaints about BT’s power – which have never gone away – have grown louder.

But other than competitors' chagrin, is there any evidence that breaking up BT would deliver better a phone and internet service for customers?

By virtue of its history, BT owns and manages almost all the telephone and broadband cables and exchanges in the country (which other service providers must pay to access) while also offering its own competing home and business packages to customers. Operating from an advantageous position, competitors such as Sky and TalkTalk might say.

These concerns were previously tackled by telecoms regulator Ofcom in 2005, when it required BT to separate its broadband and phone network access services by creating Openreach, an arms-length division of BT that handles the national broadband network. Openreach is required by Ofcom to offer the same terms to competing firms as it does to BT in order to provide a level playing field – a process generally known as Local Loop Unbundling.

Consequently, even though Sky and TalkTalk have respectively 20% and 15% of the UK broadband market, this is only made possible because they can use the Openreach network to connect their customers. This is because, unless anyone else embarks on a hugely ambitious (and unneccessary) cable-laying project, it’s essentially the only telephone network there is. In contrast, BT has a 31% market share.

Mobile phone operator Vodafone is soon to enter the market as it gears up to offer domestic broadband services using Openreach’s network, and also its own national infrastructure acquired through the purchase of Cable & Wireless Worldwide in 2012.

The concern expressed by Sky and Talk Talk is that by being part of the BT Group, Openreach is too much influenced by the strategic decisions of its parent. This in turn, they argue, can result in an under-investment in the UK’s broadband infrastructure – to the detriment of their own business as they are totally reliant on Openreach to deliver services. Such under-investment could worsen, they claim, as BT has to find £12.5 billion to pay for its acquisition of EE. But these ignore the strict regulatory framework imposed by Ofcom and under which Openreach must operate.

Towering over the competition? BT Tower by Sue Robinson/www.shutterstock.com

More than one set of wires to consider

So, should the UK’s broadband network be managed by a totally separate and independent company, along the lines of Network Rail (railways) or National Grid (electricity and gas), by taking Openreach off BT?

Before we consider that question we must recognise another important player in the mix: Virgin Media has a 20% share of the UK broadband market but delivers services over its own cable TV network built during the 1990s – a market to which BT was denied access in order to stimulate competition. Virgin Media’s new owner, US firm Liberty Global, has recently sanctioned a £3 billion investment to expand its network reach by a third. But there is no obligation from Ofcom for Virgin Media to offer access to its network for other providers: if Openreach becomes independent, what should happen to the 20% marketshare based on infrastructure owned by Virgin Media?

Equally, what do you do about the growth in mobile broadband? With 4G connectivity speeds now rivalling those available on some domestic broadband connections, it’s clear there’s going to be significant growth in this area and new competition. So should mobile broadband access also be brought under the wing of a National Grid-style company?

Keeping the consumer’s interest at heart

Sky and TalkTalk clearly have a vested interest, hoping that an independent Openreach will mean lower prices for them – but not necessarily for us. On the other hand BT is unlikely to want to divest itself of Openreach, which currently generates almost 30% of its revenue. Complicating any potential break up would be the question of how a much smaller BT would then be able to support its pension scheme – already a cool £7b billion in the red.

In the ten years since Ofcom’s first strategic review of digital communications, the telecoms landscape and our internet use have changed enormously. While the UK may well have lagged behind Europe in broadband access speed for much of that time, there is clear evidence that things are changing for the better. Competition, regulation, investment and government initiatives to tackle difficult areas such as rural connectivity are helping to improve performance in a way that benefits us all.

So extricating Openreach from BT won’t necessarily change anything. It’s already heavily regulated by Ofcom, and that would continue. If service providers believe an independent Openreach will drive down prices, then where will the investment required to further expand the high-speed fibre and future G.Fast networks come from? And how should we compare the domestic broadband services from Openreach with cable and mobile operators' services?

Limiting our consideration to BT is to see only part of the overall picture. Hopefully Ofcom’s new strategic review will take a much wider view.

A promised 'right' to fast internet rings hollow for millions stuck with 20th-century speeds

Superfast? I'll be the judge of that. BT van by urbanbuzz/www.shutterstock.com

In response to the government’s recent declarations that internet speeds of 100Mb/s should be available to “nearly all homes” in the UK, a great many might suggest that this is easier said than done. It would not be the first such bold claim, yet internet connections in many rural areas still languish at 20th-century speeds.

The government’s digital communications infrastructure strategy contains the intention of giving customers the “right” to a broadband connection of at least 5Mb/s in their homes.

There’s no clear indication of any timeline for introduction, nor what is meant by “nearly all homes” and “affordable prices”. But in any case, bumping the minimum speed to 5Mb/s is hardly adequate to keep up with today’s online society. It’s less than the maximum possible ADSL1 speed of 8Mb/s that was common in the mid-2000s, far less than the 24Mb/s maximum speed of ADSL2+ that followed, and far, far less than the 30-60Mb/s speeds typical of fibre optic or cable broadband connections available today.

In fact a large number of rural homes still are not able to access even the previously promised 2Mb/s minimum of the Digital Britain report in 2009.

Serious implications

As part of our study of rural broadband access we interviewed 27 people from rural areas in England and Wales about the quality of their internet connection and their daily experiences with slow and unreliable internet. Only three had download speeds of up to 6Mb/s, while most had connections that barely reached 1Mb/s. Even those who reported the faster speeds were still unable to carry out basic online tasks in a reasonable amount of time. For example using Google Maps, watching online videos, or opening several pages at once would require several minutes of buffering and waiting. Having several devices share the connection at a time wasn’t even an option.

So the pledge for a “right” to 5Mb/s made by the chancellor of the exchequer, George Osborne, is as meaningless as previous promises for 2Mb/s. Nor is it close to far enough. The advertised figure refers to download speed, of which the upload speed is typically only a fraction. This means uploads far slower even than these slow download speeds, rendering it all but unusable for those needing to send large files, such as businesses.

With constantly moving timescales for completion, the government doesn’t seem to regard adequate rural broadband connections as a matter of urgency, even while the consequences for those affected are often serious and urgent at the same time. In Snowdonia, for example, a fast and more importantly reliable broadband connection can be a matter of life and death.

The Llanberis Mountain Rescue team at the foot of Mount Snowdon receives around 200 call-outs a year to rescue mountaineers from danger. Their systems are connected to police and emergency services, all of which run online to provide a quick and precise method of locating lost or injured mountaineers. But their internet connection is below 1Mb/s and cuts out regularly, especially in bad weather, which interferes with dispatching the rescue teams quickly. With low signal or no reception at all in the mountains, neither mobile phone networks nor satellite internet connections are alternatives.

All geared up but no internet connection. Anne-Marie Oostveen, Author provided

Connection interrupted

Even besides life and death situations, slow and unreliable internet can seriously affect people – their social lives, their family connections, their health and even their finances. Some of those we interviewed had to drive one-and-a-half hours to the nearest city in order to find internet connections fast enough to download large files for their businesses. Others reported losing clients because they weren’t able to maintain a consistent online presence or conduct Skype meetings. Families were unable to check up on serious health conditions of their children, while others, unable to work from home, were forced to commute long distances to an office.

Rural areas: high on appeal, low on internet connectivity. Bianca Reisdorf, Author provided

Especially in poorer rural areas such as North Wales, fast and reliable internet could boost the economy by enabling small businesses to emerge and thrive. It’s not a lack of imagination and ability holding people in the region back, it’s the lack of 21st-century communications infrastructure that most of us take for granted.

The government’s strategy document explains that it “wants to support the development of the UK’s digital communications infrastructure”, yet in doing so wishes “to maintain the principle that intervention should be limited to that which is required for the market to function effectively.”

It is exactly this vagueness that is currently preventing communities from taking matters into their own hands. Many of our interviewees said they still hoped BT would deploy fast internet to their village or premises, but had been given no sense of when that might occur, if at all, or that given timescales slip. “Soon” seems to be the word that keeps those in the countryside in check, causing them to hold off on looking for alternatives – such as community efforts like the B4RN initiative in Lancashire.

If the government is serious about the country’s role as a digital nation, it needs to provide feasible solutions for all populated areas of the country, which means affordable, and future-proof, which entails fibre to the premises (FTTP) – and sooner rather than later.

Meet the super salamander, who very nearly ate your ancestors for breakfast

Toilet jaws: the scourge of people and dinosaurs 200m years ago University of Edinburgh

Say hello to one of the strangest creatures to ever call our planet home: a giant salamander-like amphibian that lurked in the waters of Europe more than 200m years ago.

My colleagues and I recently discovered this new beast, whose fossils we found in Portugal. Its scientific name is Metoposaurus algarvensis, a nod to the sunny holiday region in southern Portugal where its bones can be found eroding from an ancient cliff. But as we so often do, we gave it a cheeky nickname that is a little more fun, and certainly easier to pronounce. We call it the “super salamander”.

That name pretty much sums it up. It was more than two metres long and probably weighed roughly as much as a human. Its head was the size of a coffee table, studded with hundreds of piercing teeth. Its big, broad, almost flat upper and lower jaws were hinged together at the back and could snap shut like a toilet seat to gobble up fish, other amphibians, and maybe even small dinosaurs and mammals.

Reptilian rulers

Some of these temnospondyls were even larger: the terrifying Prionosuchus was around eight to ten metres long and could have eaten Metoposaurus for a snack. Yet our super salamander warrants interest, if only because it’s a weird animal. It may as well be an alien from another planet.

Prionosuchus: even bigger and badder than super salamander Wikimedia, CC BY-SA

And this is the case with so many fossils that get their 15 minutes of fame in the press. Several weeks ago, a 480m-year-old “human-sized lobster ancestor” went viral online. And just a few days ago, another wacky creature living alongside the earliest dinosaurs got the celebrity treatment: a car-sized “butcher croc” called Carnufex .

Sometimes the way fossils are treated in the press makes it seem like they are nothing more than oddities, curiosities, or in the modern digital world, clickbait. You could almost imagine Metoposaurus or Carnufex in a prehistoric circus: come and see the fossil freaks!

But the reason most of us study fossils is not just because they are a talking point, but because they are our only record of how life has changed over time. They give us clues to how real animals and ecosystems have evolved and have responded to dramatic climate changes and environmental shifts.

Pangaea nights

Is it a bird? Is it a plane? No, it’s super salamander!

In the background were the very first dinosaurs and mammals: small, marginal, almost forgettable animals. If you were around back then, you would never imagine that these shadowy creatures would go on to evolve into things like Tyrannosaurus and humans.

At this fragile time in their evolution, these groups were just getting their footing. Animals such as Metoposaurus were waiting near the shores to ambush little primitive dinosaurs that ventured too close to the water.

But things changed. Around 200m years ago, Pangaea began to break apart. As North America and Europe ripped away from each other, huge volcanoes started to erupt. Others erupted further south, as South America ruptured from Africa.

These volcanoes were nothing like the Hawaiian lava flows or Pompeii-style explosive eruptions that we are familiar with. These were huge fissures in the earth, which spewed out lava more or less constantly for thousands of years.

Around 3m cubic kilometres of lava were expelled. The rock formed when it cooled down covers huge swaths of the eastern United States, the western fringe of Europe, and the coasts of South America and Africa today.

This lava brought with it many other things: noxious gases that poisoned the atmosphere and dramatic shifts in climate, most likely violent alternations between hothouse and icehouse worlds.

Many plants and animals couldn’t cope. Many of the big amphibians, including Metoposaurus and its close kin, were decimated. Having dominated for tens of millions of years, they suddenly couldn’t handle this new world of fire and ice.

Two of the groups that did make it through were the dinosaurs and mammals. Whether by good genes or good luck, these pesky, almost pathetic early species found the means to cope with the extinction. And as things returned to normal and the Jurassic world dawned, they spread around the world and diversified into numerous species.

They remain here today: dinosaurs as 10,000 species of living birds (surviving after over 150m years of domination as Tyrannosaurus and Brachiosaurus-type animals) and about half that many mammals, ranging from mice to men.

So although it will surely be lost in the headline hoopla, the point is this: if those volcanoes didn’t kill off the super salamanders, you probably wouldn’t be sitting here now.

Three wireless technologies that could make 5G even faster

5G, wringing out the network cloth for the most capacity possible. towers by hin255/www.shutterstock.com

The capacity of today’s wireless communications networks has increased one million-fold since the introduction of the first cellular network in 1957.

But this improvement isn’t due to improving connectivity technologies such as WiFi, 2G, 3G and so on, which have contributed only a five-fold increase. Using additional radio frequency spectrum to carry network traffic accounts for a 25-fold improvement – but the largest single improvement, accounting for a 1,600-fold increase, is via shrinking the size of the network “cells” that constitute the network. In other words, installing more physical network towers, repeaters and other equipment to create a more dense network of nodes that can carry greater network traffic.

But this has been very expensive – digging for cables, putting up towers and base stations, installation and maintenance, and all the planning and bureaucratic requirements that entails. So much of the next generation 5G mobile network design focuses on squeezing greater speed and capacity from what we already have, without the costs of adding more infrastructure.

Decoupling send and receive

One area under investigation is the concept of downlink (DL) and uplink (UL) decoupling, dubbed by some of its co-inventors DUDe. From the first generation mobile networks to the latest 4G, the downlink (or receive) and uplink (or send) connections of any communication session have been coupled together. This means a mobile phone associates with one base station at a time and data is both sent and received through the same connection.

Historically this was a near-optimal approach, since that way the base station and mobile phone would establish the strongest connection that could be provided in both directions. However as mobile networks have become more diverse, mixing together network cells of different sizes and transmission towers of different transmission power, it now makes more sense to separate the two. A phone could receive information through a high-power, large network cell for maximum speed, and use smaller cells to send data through its lower-power radio. This can yield double capacity and make connections up to ten times more reliable.

Doubling up on duplex

Another area under investigation is that of full duplex radio transmission. Full duplex refers to the concept of being able to transmit and receive over the same frequency at the same time, in the same way we’re able to talk over each other on a traditional, analog landline telephone.

The sort of repeaters used to extend network coverage in the satellite, broadcasting and mobile network industries have used full duplex for decades. But this is achieved using two different antennas placed sufficiently far apart that the strong transmitting signal does not interfere with the weaker receiver signal. Who can design a single-antenna system that provides full duplex operation?

It all comes down to using signal echo cancellation. The first milestone work appeared in 1978 but was not made operational until the 1990s. The essence of all these systems is to cancel the strong outgoing transmit signal from the weak incoming receive signal, eliminating interference. However this technique only works over a fairly narrow bandwidth of a few MHz or so.

Only recently has the ability to offer full duplex over wide bandwidths become available, ranging from 10-100MHz, where cancellation is achieved both in the analog as well as digital domain.

CoSMIC, the first full-duplex wireless transceiver in a single silicon chip. Jin Zhou/Harish Krishnaswamy/Columbia University

One firm leading in this area is Kumu Networks, a spin-out firm from Stanford University engineers which garnered US$15m investment funding following its first demonstration of full duplex using signal inversion cancellation techniques four years ago. The technology refines existing theoretical work and is compliant with real-world cellular systems. This is an important step from a proposed feature to a viable product.

Using similar techniques, engineers at Columbia University have recently implemented this on a single chip, miniaturising the circuitry required for full duplex into a single silicon chip for the first time. At this scale, the technology could be introduced to mobile phone handsets or tablets to improve performance – potentially a game-changing moment as adding further silicon chips to existing mobile phones or tablets is relatively straightforward. With some extra tuning, if introduced universally this could essentially allow us to double network capacity overnight.

Significantly more antennas

Another approach is massive multiple antenna systems, dubbed Massive-MIMO. Invented by Tom Marzetta at Bell Labs, it uses a very, very large number of antennas stuffed into base stations and mobile phone handsets if possible. We’re talking thousands of antennas, rather than the three to six commonly used today. Counter-intuitively, in theory this would in fact eliminate interference in the system and significantly boost network capacity and reliability.

For now, all these approaches are still at an early stage and face considerable challenges. However, while these 5G designs would require some software and hardware upgrades, one thing they won’t require is digging holes and laying cables.

When your body becomes your password, the end of the login is nigh

Soon you will be the key. face scan by Franck Boston/www.shutterstock.com

Passwords are a pain. I’ve just had to rummage around for the password required in order to post this article. I seem to have 100 or more different identities on different websites to manage. Whenever I book a flight or buy a concert ticket this often means setting up yet another persona and coming up with a password to authenticate it.

It’s got so bad I’ve resorted to a password manager program to suggest secure, truly random passwords and then keep track of them for me. Of course if I forget the password to that program, or worse still if someone else guesses that password, I’ll be in all sorts of trouble.

Your phone is the key

This is a recognised problem, so it’s no surprise firms are looking at ways to make this easier. In the US, Yahoo has announced it plans to move to a password-on-demand system, where a new, one-time password is generated and texted to your mobile phone, and you can text the password to Yahoo’s servers whenever its services require authentication.

This makes it things easier for the user, whose phone is now a key as well as everything else. But some security experts have been less than impressed. For example, many phones show the text of incoming messages automatically, popping up even when the phone is locked. All that would be required is five minutes alone with your phone and your Yahoo account could be hijacked. And who hasn’t left their phone unattended for even just a short while?

How about your body?

All this hassle with usernames and passwords has led many to think biometrics are the answer, in which uniquely identifying elements of our physical body are used as authentication keys. Obviously this still needs to be miniaturised. scanner by aurin/www.shutterstock.com

The most common, fingerprints, have been used as a means to authenticate users for some time. Fingerprint-based controlled access can be made to work reasonably well, although it is not immune to successful attack. When you find that Sherlock Holmes was cracking cases in 1903 which involved forged fingerprints, you might be forgiven for wondering if we really can provide security on the basis of our fingertips and thumbs. However, modern biometric security goes further to try to provide greater security.

Goodbye Windows password

Microsoft is building biometric password support into the forthcoming Windows 10, due to arrive later this year. The Windows Hello component, essentially a login screen, will be able to use a webcam to examine the user’s face, iris, or a fingerprint scanner to unlock devices and provide Windows logon. Microsoft are also touting a mechanism built into its Passport service that will provide authentication on your behalf to other sites once you have successfully logged on to your computer and it has recognised you.

Halifax, the bank, has gone one step further for its online banking services. It is currently testing a smart wristband called Nymi which reads the wearer’s heartbeat – another biometric measure that provides a rhythmic pattern that can be used as a unique identifier. Heartbeat biometrics are touted as harder to fake or fool than other biometrics, although when I consider what happens to my heartbeat when I check my bank balance I’d imagine it will need considerable testing.

Give me convenience or give me death

All this is a step toward the Holy Grail of authentication: security with convenience. Microsoft’s moves in this direction are as part of the FIDO Alliance which aims to improve the way we approach security for devices and online services in the future, improving security and reducing the burden on users, which has a tendency to lead towards corner-cutting, weak or re-used passwords, and security compromises.

The good news for us password jugglers is that there is now a greater imperative behind building higher levels of security into systems from the outset, rather than trying to add it on afterwards, and that new and better ways of doing this are being expored. Modern devices, the latest Dell tablet for example, have 3D cameras which can generate images that contain depth information as well as a visible picture. The wider introduction of these sorts of components and their successors will offer a way to provide a whole new way of authentication, to the point that in the not too distant future our smile really will be our passport.