A British organization has decided to launch an alternative to our tradition four/five-digit pin code by adding a bit of emotion and fun to online banking. This so called alternative is the introduction of ‘emojis’.
Intelligent Environments, a company based in London that provides banking software, has stated that its Emoji Passcode service is more secure because there are more potential combinations of the 44 emojis than there are of the numbers 0-10.
David Webber, managing director of Intelligent Environments, has asked the question as to “Why can’t financial service be fun and innovative?” as this system is designed to appeal to 15 to 25-year-olds. He has also included that there is a lot of interest in the Emoji Passcode service by digital banks.
Meanwhile, Alan Woodward, A cyber-security expert professor says that patterns and images were already used by some firms as a useful alternative to remembering complex sequences of numbers and letters. As much as he feels that this is an interesting and potentially valuable step forward he has also highlighted the fact that even though the permutations and combinations of emojis would require a hacker to run through a much greater number of cycles than they do for so-called ‘dictionary attacks.’
Woodward seems very certain there are hackers who will work on breaking into these systems so in his books he would very much have some sort of two-factor authentication.
