Password Pill — Can Be Swallowed Like a Vitamin

What if you never had to type a password again — because your own body was the password? That was the pitch from Regina Dugan, head of Motorola's Advanced Technology and Projects group and the former director of DARPA, at the D11 conference in June 2013.

How does the password pill work?

The pill is made by California-based Proteus Digital Health. It contains a tiny chip — about the size of a grain of sand — with a switch. When you swallow it, the acids in your stomach act as the electrolyte, powering the chip like an inside-out potato battery. The switch flips on and off, creating an 18-bit ECG-like signal in your body. "Essentially your entire body becomes your authentication token," Dugan said. "When I touch my phone, my computer, my door, my car, I'm authenticated in."

Why a pill instead of a password?

Authentication is irritating — and people are bad at it precisely because it's irritating. Dugan's framing was deliberately homely: "I take a vitamin every morning. What if I could take vitamin authentication?" A pill you swallow once a day, the way you'd take a daily vitamin, could log you into everything you touch.

Was it actually safe?

The Proteus ingestible sensor had already been cleared by the US Food and Drug Administration in 2012 (after European approval in 2010) for medical use — it was designed to record when medication is taken. Dugan noted the technology was safe enough to take every day for a month without problems.

What else did Motorola show?

Alongside the pill, Dugan demonstrated an electronic tattoo made by MC10 — a skin-worn patch with an antenna and sensors that could authenticate a user for up to a week at a time. "They would wear a tattoo, if only to piss off their parents," she joked about teenagers. Read the full D11 report on silicon.co.uk

The catch, even then: Motorola was clear these ideas were not hitting the market anytime soon. More than a decade later, they remain what they were in 2013 — a provocative glimpse of authentication without passwords.