Project Mandrake – NSA identifies smart device users by the way they type
The NSA has managed to develop a new technology that can identify smart device users by the way they type and swipe on their mobile phones.
The new technology was named Mandrake, as announced by employees of the cybersecurity company Lockheed Martin, which helped develop this project.
Mandrake is able to remotely analyze the curve, speed and acceleration with which the user touches their smartphone 's touchscreen , information which is unique to each user.
“No one has the same touch,” explains John Mears, a partner at Lockheed IT. Mears also says that “people can copy writing style in two dimensions, but they can’t do it in three or four dimensions.” The third dimension is the pressure with which the user presses the screen, and the fourth is the time it takes to type.
Officially, the NSA has developed the Mandrake technology for identity verification purposes, but data protection advocates fear its potential use for user surveillance.
Nextgov reports that Lockheed Martin has been involved in other projects with the US government that could pose a serious threat to users' privacy. The news agency cites as an example an FBI project that has collected a billion facial features, fingerprints, palm printsand iris scans into a biometric database.
The FBI project is called the Next Generation Identification Systemand in the near future it will be able to identify users by their voice and the way they walk.
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