Tired Of All Those Passwords? Here Are Some Alte

BILL GATES MAY be one of the smartest guys in the country, but even he's annoyed at having to remember a soup of personal passwords for activities like withdrawing money and going online. He also thinks they're insecure. At last week's Comdex computer convention in Las Vegas, the Microsoft CEO railed against the password as a ""weak link.'' One of his proposed solutions: biometrics, the measuring of unique characteristics like the fingerprint and the iris of the eye for the purpose of authenticating identity.

That delighted the dozen or so companies that brought biometric technology to Comdex. Mostly start-ups, they came to Vegas shopping schemes to identify you by your hands, your eyes, your voice, even the way you type. ""We want to see a biometrics row in every CompUSA, right next to joysticks and printers,'' says Kevin Corson of True Touch, a maker of software that works with various forms of the technology. But since there's no commonly recognized standard for how such devices should be incorporated into machines like PCs or ATMs, biometrics probably won't become widely used--if it ever is--until the next millennium.

Nevertheless, Comdex attendees eagerly lined up at the booth of IriScan, a firm based in Marlton, N.J., to hold a scanner--it looked a bit like a hair dryer--about three inches from their eyes. The device works by taking a video image of the iris (the ring of color around the pupil), breaking the image into circular grids and analyzing the unique patterns within each area. The company says there's only a one-in-1078 chance that two people's irises will match in its system.

A company called Identicator, in San Bruno, Calif., is aiming a little lower--at your index fingers. The company licenses its scanners to Compaq and other companies, which integrate them into keyboards and mice or sell them as $100 stand-alone units that you can plug into your computer. The scanners measure 43 points along the ridges and crevices of your finger, then search through a database for a match. One advantage of measuring fingerprints: law enforcement already does it. ""This has been the most commonly used biometric for over a hundred years,'' says Identicator vice president Grant Evans.

Christopher Tomes, CEO of Chicago-based Veritel, points out that iris and fingerprint identification requires new and somewhat exotic hardware. His company's technique is to have people talk into plain old microphones, even telephones. You provide basic information like your name, place of birth, favorite color. To get into any voice-protected system, the same voice must utter the same answers. But what if your voice is altered by a bad cold or laryngitis? In such cases, Veritel lets you go through a ""back door'' by answering a series of personal questions. Like passwords, that information can conceivably be stolen.

Other biometric companies at Comdex employ different personal traits as markers. The San Jose, Calif.-based Cyber-SIGN asks you to put a pen to an electromagnetic tablet and sign your name three times in order to match a stored version of your signature. (Good luck doing it with a crowd watching.) And NetNanny, makers of Internet-filtering software for families, claims to eliminate the need for passwords by identifying you by your ""unique typing rhythm.'' That's the length of time you spend pressing keys and moving your fingers around the keyboard.