Today I learned Motorola was once developing a password pill that turns your body into an authentication token: 'We have demoed this working and authenticating a phone'

Richard Williams, President and CEO Chief Technical Officer for Advanced Analogic Technologies, Inc. Pictures taken at Euan Barty Associates, Central. 30 March 2004 — (Image credit: Getty Images / South China Morning Post)

Did you know that, for a brief few years, Motorola (or more accurately, Motorola Mobility) was owned by Google? If you didn't know that, then you likely also don't know that, in those two cursed years, Motorola showed off a password pill you swallow as a form of password authentication. Yeah, 2013 was weird.

As brought to my attention by Hackaday, this password pill would house a small chip that would dissolve in your stomach and emit an 18-bit ECG-style signal from your body. Regina Dugan, the then-research head at Motorola, said, "Essentially, your entire body becomes your authentication token."

According to All Things D, the only thing tests could determine was whether you had them. Then-Motorola head Dennis Woodside said “This isn’t stuff that’s going to ship anytime soon, but I think having the boldness to think differently about problems that everybody has every day is really important for Motorola now.”

The password pill was being worked on with a company called Proteus Digital Health, and it already had FDA approval for an ingestible sensor that could be used as a medical device. Naturally, being early on in development, we didn't get a price point or nutritional information for those yummy, yummy chips. However, Dugan did say, "We have demoed this working and authenticating a phone."

At the time, Motorola were also intent on 'fixing' the "mechanical mismatch between humans and electronics" with a password tattoo. Motorola was working on this alongside a company called MC10, which made stretchable circuits. Justifying this, Dugan said, “Electronics are boxy and rigid, and humans are curvy and soft.”

Continuing on, and definitely not sounding like a tech super villain, Dugan said, “it means that my arms are like wires, my hands are like alligator clips — when I touch my phone, my computer, my door, my car, I’m authenticated in. It’s my first superpower. I want that.”

Or you can just get a password manager. They're really good… I've been told. I wouldn't know, as I just write my passwords on my arm and hope they don't rub off in the night, potentially leaving me without access to my MySpace page forever. The horror.

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James is a more recent PC gaming convert, often admiring graphics cards, cases, and motherboards from afar. It was not until 2019, after just finishing a degree in law and media, that they decided to throw out the last few years of education, build their PC, and start writing about gaming instead. In that time, he has covered the latest doodads, contraptions, and gismos, and loved every second of it. Hey, it’s better than writing case briefs.

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