I think it's fair to say that most people are fed up with passwords. We either use the same easy-to-remember-but-insecure code across Amazon, Reddit, and Spotify, or we do what we're supposed to and create long passwords full of numbers and special characters that are unique to each site—and impossible to remember. Then we write down those passwords somewhere, on a scrap of paper or in our email, negating the purpose of having a password in the first place.

Today, researchers are offering up a new alternative: using the human mind's innate ability to recognize the familiar. The researchers call the system Facelock, and their study was published this morning in the journal PeerJ.

Thanks to the incredible power of the brain, we can recognize friends' faces easily, even when images are fuzzy, have vastly different lighting, or are taken from different angles. Yet when we look at two different pictures of an unfamiliar face, we're not even sure if it's the same person. Scientists from the University of York in the U.K. exploited this quirk to develop Facelock.

Test subjects suggested between four and 10 "Z-List" celebrities to use as their familiar faces. By Z-list, we mean they chose people who were famous in a specific area but would otherwise be unrecognizable: their favorite xylophonist, rocket engineer, or obscure actor who appeared on that one episode of Doctor Who in the 1970s.

Facelock shows users nine faces at a time. Eight of the faces are unrecognizable to the user, but one of the faces is a Z-lister that the user suggested in the setup. The users select the familiar faces, and after they correctly choose four faces in a row, they're logged in. One year later, despite having used Facelock only once, 86 percent of the users could successfully log in—compare that with 30 percent of users who can remember passwords after three months.

Less than one percent of strangers who tried were able to hack in, and that's mostly because a few users chose recognizable celebrities such as the members of Led Zeppelin, and John Wayne. The unfamiliar faces proved tough even for those attackers who stared over users' shoulders. They had a 98 percent failure rate. Close friends and partners had a 6 percent success rate, persumably because your husband and your BFF have a better chance of recognizing your favorite actor to cameo as a Law & Order murderer.

Though this study is a proof of concept rather than a prototype ready to be put to use, it highlights how companies are shifting away from password authentication. Apple and Samsung, for example, are moving toward fingerprint verification. For those who don't have iPhones or the Galaxy, password managers like KeePass and LastPass can help them keep all those passwords straight. But maybe someday you'll use an obscure memory—rather than an obscure alphanumeric chain of characters—to log into Facebook.

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