Picture Passwords More Secure than Text

Hugh Pickens writes "People possess a remarkable ability for recalling pictures and researchers at Newcastle University are exploiting this characteristic to create graphical passwords that they say are a thousand times more secure than ordinary textual passwords. With Draw a Secret (DAS) technology, users draw an image over a background, which is then encoded as an ordered sequence of cells. The software recalls the strokes, along with the number of times the pen is lifted. If a person chooses a flower background and then draws a butterfly as their secret password image onto it, they have to remember where they began on the grid and the order of their pen strokes. The "passpicture" is recognized as identical if the encoding is the same, not the drawing itself, which allows for some margin of error as the drawing does not have to be re-created exactly. The software has been initially designed for handheld devices such as iPhones, Blackberry and Smartphone, but could soon be expanded to other areas. "The most exciting feature is that a simple enhancement simultaneously provides significantly enhanced usability and security," says computer scientist Jeff Yan."

Comments

good for some, bad for some?

[siddesu]

IMHO this is pretty good for people who can do calligraphy reasonably well.

For example, to write Chinese characters properly, you need to remember the correct "stroke order" for each dash or dot in the character, and repeat it every time you write. The position where each stroke begins and ends is also fixed. It takes some training, discipline and drilling to learn writing like this though. For sloppy writers like me (I even had trouble writing pretty letters in school, mostly due to lazitude), this may not be such a good idea after all.

Especially if you have to do it with a mouse on a shiny surface ;)