Pictorial Passwords

Stone Rhino writes: "No longer do you need to remember passwords. Now, thanks to graduate students at Berkeley you merely need to pick out the right pieces of abstract art. There is a story on it at the New York Times. However, there is a problem with it that I see: 5 images from a set of 25 means 53,130 potential combinations. This would be much easier to crack by brute force than a standard alphanumeric password with its billions of possibilities and millions of likely choices." Maybe you have to get the sequence of images correct? If so there are some six million combinations, still weaker than a optimum password but probably stronger than the passwords most people choose (usually their significant other's name). There's another article on passwords in that same NYT edition.

Comments

Re:You stoopid hack!

[Snowfox]

That should be:

du `which login`

Its is amazing what you kiddiez can learn from a *power* user!

And du -k `which login` if you want to guarantee canonical results, but we're not so pedantic that we want to go optimizing our humor now, are we?

Re:Similar to Passface

[Unknown Bovine Group]

This sounds like more psycho-bullshit. Ellen is wearing glasses and has a mole. "Sorry I have no facial recognition." But if she takes the glasses off and puts them in her hand, "OH! I see glasses in your hand. you must be Ellen!" Bullshit. We have way too many 'diseases' used to excuse what boils down to "I'm a dumbass".