Forgotten or lost passwords, a problem for IT managers and computer users, may be an issue of the past. “Facelock,” a newly proposed alternative centered around the psychology of face recognition, was announced on Jun. 24, 2014.

In addition to ending the dilemma of forgotten or lost passwords, the new alternative can also protect user’s privacy.

Many previous years of psychology research has unveiled a notable difference in recognition of familiar and unfamiliar faces. Humans are able to recognize faces across a span of images, even despite poor image quality. Consequently, recognition of unfamiliar faces is linked to a specific image, to the point where different photos of one unfamiliar face are often believed to be of different people. Facelock relies on this psychological effect to construct a new type of authentication system, of which details were published in the June 24 open-access journal PeerJ.

Dr. Rob Jenkins, lead study author, from the University of York in the UK, said in a statement, “Pretending to know a face that you don’t know is like pretending to know a language that you don’t know—it just doesn’t work. The only system that can reliably recognize faces is a human who is familiar with the faces concerned.”