Passwords are sensitive stuff, and with so many user accounts for a person to hold these days, it can get rather tricky trying to remember all of them, as some sites require 8 characters minimum, while others want a healthy mix of numbers, letters and at least one uppercase character, leaving some of us to use the same password across multiple accounts where possible. While that makes life easier for you, so too, does it make life easier for anyone with nefarious purposes who want to hack into your accounts. Nikon recently filed a patent where a password is required to activate your camera’s lens, and here we are with Apple being granted a patent that allows owners of Apple devices to retrieve their respective passwords simply be hooking up to a specific peripheral, which could very well end the reign of current traditional password recovery methods.
The U.S. Patent and Trademark Office awarded Apple today U.S. Patent No. 8,429,760, which covers “a system and method for storing a password recovery secret.” This patent was originally filed for in July 2010, where it described a system which would tie part of the password recovery process to “a commonly associated peripheral device,” where something as common as a power cord would do.