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Using Images as Passwords

Posted by CmdrTaco on from the please-select-15-images dept.

TekkenLaw writes "According to this news on Reuters, MS is looking at images rather than plain old text for enhancing security. The key - images, which tend to make more of an impression on people than strings of text characters. This is especially interesting in context of the crappy passwords story that ran on Slashdot that ran few days back." So when you call support to get your lost password, will they ask you what your mothers maiden hair color was?

4 of 268 comments (clear)

  1. thumb by zephc · · Score: 4, Interesting

    a friend of mine has a cool USB device that reads his thumb print, and he uses that to unlock his Windoze box.

    --
    "I would say that 99 per cent of what my father has written about his own life is false." - L. Ron Hubbard Jr.
  2. Dumbed-down by zecg · · Score: 4, Interesting

    From the news story: "Even with such a system, people would still be susceptible to "shoulder surfing," in which someone watches a computer user type in their password."

    Users would have to be fools to "click" their password unless they are positively alone in the room. The current standard at least has masked text on screen, and the order of keys on the keyboard is VERY difficult to track even when the user is moderately good at typing.

    Let's not forget that in the case of the new photo passwords, with 50% of users you would only have to know the "Lenny Bruce sequence" in their Playboy passphotos: T'n'A

    ~zecg.

    --
    .i lu doi ringos.star. xu do puku'aroroi dunli dopecaku leni virnu li'u
  3. Check me by blixel · · Score: 4, Interesting

    If an image is 1280x1024 and is sensative to a 10x10 pixel area, that gives the user a grid of 128x102 to click in. A total of 13,056 clickable squares. If the user's password was 5 clicks long, that would give them 379,359,275,350,832,971,776 possible passwords. Is my math correct?

  4. Let's hope they have a way of opt-ing out by merlyn · · Score: 4, Interesting
    As I said in a previous thread two months back:
    People are visually oriented, so remembering pictures is easy, especially compared to a mess of uppercase, lowercase and symbols.
    Uh, some people. I'd have to name each picture to remember it, and then remember the names. I'm a part of the 5% of the population that doesn't deal well with picture recall, and a particularly bad case of that. Let's hope this system is never mandatory for any system I have to use. It's bad enough for icons without tooltips.
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