Wired writes that Google has come up with a hardware-based authentication process that it thinks is both easy enough to use and powerful enough that people will actually adopt it.
Hardware-based authentication has been around for a long time, of course, but it's little used outside of highly security-conscious industries because most schemes require large and expensive cryptographic cards and hardware modification to connected computers.
Google's scheme uses a tiny device that can be hung on a key ring and slipped into a USB port to automatically log into a Google account. They believe that in the long run smart phones can take the place of the dedicated cards.
The question is will people actually use these things? With e-mail hacks on the rise, there may come a crossover point at which people will put up with the inconvenience of hardware encryption in order to save themselves from disasters like identity theft.
Do you think hardware encryption can go mainstream?