A Brilliant Smart Phone App Idea
OK all you budding App developers out there here’s the next big thing, SECURITY!
I know it’s a soporific subject, that is until you’re a victim then it gets your attention, but for security to be effective it needs to be easy but secure and that’s a hard trick to pull off.
If you don’t password your phone apps then anyone that can gain access to them can cause you some real headaches. Also services like Facebook use the same login details for your account on all platforms so no password would leave you very exposed. If you do password everything the ease of use goes through the floor and you won’t use the Apps on your smart phone as it’ll be too hard.
So here the challenge…
I want to be able to open email, browser based accounts, Facebook, Twitter, Qype, About Us, LinkedIn, Skype, Google+, Gumtree, eBay, well you get the picture, without a user name and secure password to enter. AND if someone nicks my phone I don’t want them to be able to get access to anything!
So why can’t I already do this? Well because they all have different user names and passwords that’s why. And I can’t remember them all or be bothered to have to type them in every time I want access an account on my tiny keyboard with silly buttons for CAPS and 123 and SYMBOLS1 and SYMBOLS2, again you get the picture.
If my password was secure, say upper and lower case letters, numbers and symbols, such as PpL18$!T8z, this would take for ever to put in via smart phone keyboard.
Here the opportunity…
Create an App that runs in real time in the background that can see when a screen requires a user name and or password. This App would have a master password or another recognition system. If it was a password it would require to be 8 digits or more and not a proper word and number (they can be cracked in seconds, yes really!).
However this raises a lot more questions:
- How do you make sure users aren’t putting silly passwords in that can be easily cracked?
- How long does the password take to time out? Do you set this to 1 min, 5 mins or hours.
- If the phone goes into sleep mode do you need to retype the PW when it awakes?
- What if someone gets your master password and steals your phone, YIKES!
- What if you forget your password?
Perhaps smart phones and tablets are technology where face recognition or finger print recognition would actually be useful. It would still need the App but without the keyboard based time consuming entry process. As this recognition process would be easy to do you could have it time out in a very short period as the grief of re-entering the password does not exist.
Perhaps the App integrates with one of the PC based password managers like RoboForm (which I use, and yes it does and an iPhone App but it only works in browser based logins and is a pain to use on a small keyboard, AND you have to be inside the App to use it not in the browser, sorry that was a rant…). Once you’ve been verified the data is pulled from your cloud based RoboForm data (already exists) which is synced to all your devices, PC, MAC, Tablet, etc., (which also already exists) and the usability of your smart phone sky rockets.
OK smart young things, over to you. And if it works could I be on the beta program and can I get a very small royalty as this will be HUGE!
While we are here have you got any other items on your wish list?
