Slashdot Mirror
Recognizing Your Own Handwriting As A Password
Gary writes "A new online authentication system called Dynahand could make logging in to websites a little easier. With Dynahand, users simply identify their own handwriting, instead of entering a cryptic password or buying a biometric device to scan their fingerprints. The user's handwriting samples contain only digits, since numerals are harder for an outside party to recognize than letters are. The digits displayed are random, so the handwriting is the only clue to the correct answer."
...who virtually cannot write by hand anymore? I can't even write a proper signature, haven't been using hand writing since I was playing RPGs 10+ years ago.
I'd say it would be pretty hard to determine how my digits would look like.
Probable impossibilities are to be preferred to improbable possibilities.
Aristotele
To anwser my own question, I found a better article:
http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18986/
Why bother? My desk is covered with my clearly recognizable scrawl, and most of it is numeric just to add insult to injury.
While the idea of a system that depends on recognition is interesting (though in my mind, not terribly secure for the exact reason you stated), handwriting is probably the poorest example because we leave handwriting samples everywhere. It'd be much more secure to have the system be "Recognize a picture of your own genitalia" because at least then you only have to worry about former significant others...And hell, for this crowd, you don't even have to worry about that.
ad logicam Claiming a proposition is false because it was presented as the conclusion of a fallacious argument.
Passwords actually strike me as quite a good security method. A good password is difficult to guess by a person or by a machine and is very simple to implement, leaving less margin for error in the technology.
I know, I know, people forget their passwords or choose the word "password" all the time. It still seems a little depressing that we have to use all this extra trickery to compensate for people being morons.
Peter
I've got a simpler idea, why don't we just ask people a simple true/false question. I've got the first:
A single html radio-button form-based multiple choice question is a reasonable security measure.
A) True
B) False
But I think there should be an option "C," though that would make this not a real t/f question:
C) WTF?!
Those who have telepathy have no need to RTFA.
What, now I have to bring a typewriter everytime I go to the restaurant - to fill in the tip and total?
That's the greatest caught masturbating at work coverup I've ever heard.
Wanna fight ? Bend over, stick your head up your ass, and fight for air.
Speak for yourself, I'm quite positive that several hundred people have seen my genitalia. Though I'm not sure they got a good enough look to be able to identify me in the short time my trenchcoat was open.
"Trolls they were, but filled with the evil will of their master: a fell race..." -- J.R.R. Tolkien on Olog-hai
Here's how you crack it:
1. generate a bunch of new sessions to the login page.
2. Identify samples that appear more often than others.
3. Recognize the handwriting style.
4. Log in.
The folks at Dynahand obviously don't know how bad hijacking someone's social network identity could be. While not as sensitive as banking or medical information, access to one's online profile is a pretty sensitive thing. A person pretending to be you on MySpace or Facebook could cause all kinds of damage to your reputation, lose you (real) friends, and leave an incriminating trail for any future employer to find. Even if you are able to regain control of your account via customer service, and could remove the offending material from your page, nothing is every really deleted from the Internet.
Exactly. In the old days, someone would have to find the stickynote on one's monitor that specifically had one's password written on it. Under this scheme, any stickynote at all will do!
biometric of someone's typing rythm strikes me as a good thing
Haven't we been over this? That system assumes that you are always logging in at the same level of drunk - that's not feasible.
sic transit gloria mundi
From the article's first paragraph:
...
You can't afford to be careless regarding the password coz you never know
And with that, I stopped reading. Why? Because I don't have enough time to read things that aren't written in at least passable English. If someone has a good idea, and are serious about it, they'll make the effort to communicate it well or have it communicated well for them.
Nothing to see in this article, and, by strong implication, a worthless idea.
Put my fist through my alarm clock with its ding-dong death inside my ear. - The Blackjacks.