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Is Battery-Free 2-Factor ID Secure?

Posted by timothy on from the go-ahead-do-your-worst dept.

An anonymous reader writes "There was a television program in Australia last week about Matthew Walker's visual battery-less two-factor authentication system called PassWindow. Essentially, you hold the clear plastic window up to the apparently random pattern on the screen of your computer, revealing a one-time PIN to type in for authentication. The plastic window has many advantages: difficult to copy or view over the shoulder, etc. Because there is no electronics, chip or battery, the PassWindow is extremely cheap to manufacture, giving it a big advantage over other two-factor authentication systems. However, I don't know about the security of the system. The apparently random pattern of lines in the PassWindow is analogous to a one-time pad, using a different subset of the one-time pad every time a PIN is needed. Is this a useful level of security for logging in to a bank account?"

1 of 180 comments (clear)

  1. Easily Rectified by brunes69 · · Score: 3, Interesting

    This is easily rectified in any software by compensating for the DPI by scaling up or down the image.

    Heck you can do this in CSS:

                IMG.passwordWindow { width: 2in, height: 1in }

    This image is going to be scaled to be the exact same size on the screen in any web browser.

    Also, this has nothing to do with color filters.

    I swear to god every poster on this thread so far has not gone to the website: http://www.passwindow.com/

    This is actually a very novel idea that has been thought out thoroughly.