Machines verify the identity of a human being by irises, heartbeats, fingertips and voices.  http://bits.blogs.nytimes.com/2013/09/10/beyond-passwords-new-tools-to-identify-humans/

Authentication has been a tough nut to crack since the early days of the Web. Now comes a batch of high-tech alternatives, some straight from science fiction, as worries grow about the security risks associated with traditional user name and password systems.

Apple on Tuesday introduced two new iPhones, including for the first time a model with a fingerprint sensor that can be used instead of a passcode to open the phone and buy products. The new feature is part of a trove of authentication tools being developed for consumers, and not just for phones.

Some of these, like the fingerprint sensor, involve the immutable properties humans are encoded with, while others turn our phones into verification devices.

Among the most novel — and also somewhat unsettling — of biometric authentication tools is a new wristband developed by cryptographers at the University of Toronto. It contains a voltmeter to read a heartbeat.
“You put it on. It knows it’s you. It communicates that identity securely to everything around you,” said Karl Martin, one of its creators.

These new technologies arrive against the backdrop of mounting concerns over security and privacy.

Biometric sensors raise questions of security. When Apple’s sensor was announced on Tuesday, a flurry of skepticism and privacy concerns erupted online even though Apple said users’ fingerprints would be stored only on the phone — not sent to online servers or made available to app developers.

University of California, Berkeley computer scientists there say a simple and cheap headset will be able to read your brain waves to verify your thoughts — and save you the work of typing in a password.

“The idea that all the things around us are going to be intelligent is great, but they don’t all have screens and keyboards and password managers,” Johnathan Nightingale, a vice president of engineering at Mozilla said. “They can’t always count on 12 uppercase letters, three lowercase letters, two punctuation marks and a percent symbol.”

He regretted that his tech colleagues had been stymied by the problem for so long. “We tell ourselves as a group we are predicting the future,” he said. “Mostly we are hoping for the future.”