Researchers at Microsoft Corp. are working on new types of passwords that will be easier for people to remember but harder for hackers to crack.
The key -- images, which tend to make more of an impression on people than strings of text characters.
Darko Kirovski, a cryptography and anti-piracy researcher at Microsoft, demonstrated a prototype password system at Microsoft offices in Mountain View, California, on Wednesday.
On a screen full of images of different country flags, he clicked on a number of points within the images that correspond to specific pixels. The series of pixels is then converted into a random number and stored in the computer, he said.
Users simply remember exactly where on the images they clicked and in what order.