A new paper from Israel has proposed an authentication scheme based on a user's aesthetic preferences, wherein the user calibrates the system one time by rating images, thereby generating a private'domain' of that individual's visual and visual/conceptual predilections. Later, the user would be challenged at authentication time to match their recorded preferences against novel image sets. From the trials of a'game-ized' AEbA implementation – left, the user rates the aesthetic quality of an image; right, a score is signaled at the end of a stage in the active application phase of the trials . The system is titled Aesthetic Evaluation-based Authentication (AEbA), and is a submission to the 2022 USENIX Annual Technical Conference in California in July. AEbA was trialed by the paper's researchers in the form of a game series, where participants were required to train the system and then rate new images that accorded with their registered tastes.

As a young and fair-weather gamer, I loved playing Super Mario Brothers because it was my older brother's favorite game, and I wanted to be just like him. I can still hear the 8-bit theme song in my head, and I'm guessing you can too, if you played Mario as a kid. "Bah dat dat doo dat dat doo," goes the classic, repetitive, 1985 jam. The ubiquity of those notes in many of our childhoods was as constant as a hug from grandma, a pack of Gushers after school, or Saturday morning cartoons. Retro games like Mortal Kombat, Street Fighter, and The Legend of Zelda are comfort food for gamers.