Sesame, a free app created by Dr. Mehrdad Aliasgari’s Security Lab in the computer engineering and science department, was due to come out in November and has yet to be released.
Aliasgari said the app, intended for the android and IOS counterparts, is like a digital vault for passwords; he said that what makes Sesame special is its biometric speaker recognition system, which turns a user’s voice into a command.
“Everyone is connected,” Aliasgari said. “Technology has become so mainstream that everybody relies on technology heavily, and it has integrated in every aspect of your life.”
Speaker recognition, in theory, should make Sesame nearly impossible to hack, since every voice is unique, much like a fingerprint, Aliasgari said.
“There is more than 7 billion people living out there, and I’m sure there’s a good population of people who just want to go after victims,” Aliasgari, a professor of cryptography and computer security at Cal State University Long Beach, said.
Sesame is a password manager app, which not only stores passwords, but creates long complex passwords that can be used for various web services such as, Facebook, Twitter, email and company accounts.
“We call it Sesame because we all grew up with this story of Ali Baba. Except [our Sesame] only opens to you,” states Dr. Aliasgari, “The thing with open sesame and Ali Baba was that it was only speech recognition, right? Anybody who said, ‘Open sesame,’ the cave would open, and that’s how Ali Baba got in.”
Dr. Aliasgari created Security Lab in order to focus on computer security research.
“I came [to CSULB] with the intention to educate students about the best practices of security and what they’re supposed to do, especially computer scientists and programmers who design systems like that,” Aliasgari said.
“We are trying to break things, we’re trying to build things,” Aliasgari said. “Now we have really cool projects happening, one of those projects that got the attention was this whole Sesame app.”