Riya is a service based on facial recognition technology that enable user to spot known people in their photo collections and automatically add tags. See this early review from Techcrunch. I’ve requested an invitation to Tara Hunt, Riya chief blogger, and I’m looking forward to test it on my 2 thousands wedding shots.

But wouldn’t be nice to use Riya as a single sign-on (SSO)platform?

Imagine a web service XYZ that, during the creation of your account, asks to submit a pictures of your face. Then, any time you need to authenticate with XYZ, you can fill in the usual username/password form, or just stare into your webcam. The webcam sends your face straight to a Riya server, meanwhile the XYZ login page send a request to Riya to check if there is a recent pictures of your face matching the face associated to your account in the XYZ database.

The sensitivity of service XYZ will determine how aged could be the picture in the Riya server in order to succeed in the authentication. Less than five seconds for an online banking service, one hour for your web based email, one month for your social bookmark site. (of course given that all requests come from the same IP address)

Since most of our laptops, desktops and mobile phones are equipped with a camera, this scenario could be not science fiction.