Why you might never have to remember your password again

We all hate them and can never remember them, quantum computing could make them obsolete – and now AI can guess them by listening to your keyboard. Now technology companies are trying to come up with something to replace them – and might already, quietly, be some of the way there, writes Andrew Griffin

Children with extreme right-wing ideologies are ‘getting substantially younger’ police have warned after 19 children were arrested in connection with terrorism offences in 2021 (Getty Images/iStockphoto)

It is 1961 and MIT computer scientist Fernando Corbató has a problem. The university has large computers stored with large files, and anyone can access them.

The solution was a technology that has gone on to proliferate across computers and annoy their users for more than 60 years since: the password. Corbató’s solution was to build a system that would only open files with the right set of letters, and was used both to secure files as well as share out computing resources at a time when they were valuable and limited.

It is a year later, in 1962, and Allan Scherr, another MIT computer scientist, has a problem of his own. The work he is doing is using far too much computing resources, and he is going to have his programs deleted; he had come up with a trick to steal more computer time, but it was not enough to fully run the simulations he wanted to.