I cannot remember where I read this in the past day but Slashdot was kind enough to give me a helpful reminder...
Remembering passwords could get a lot easier, according to a research project, "Déjà Vu", at the University of California at Berkeley, which is requiring participants to select a series of images as a password.
A user first picks out a personal portfolio of five colorful images. The pictures are based on mathematical equations that assign a color to each pixel in the image. Different numerical inputs into the equations generate different pictures. Those numbers, rather than the images, are stored in the computer.
When a user has to identify himself to a computer, a Web site or a bank ATM., these 5 images are shown among a set of 25 images. The user then picks out the pictures from his portfolio.
In their tests, 90 percent of the people were able to use Déjà Vu images successfully, while only about 70 percent remembered their passwords and PIN's.
And in a related article, it just goes to show that un-educated computer users (and even the educated computer user...) need to pick better passwords, with the example that at a popular Web site that had 2.5 million registered users with an average age of 25, popular passwords were "stud," "goddess," "cutiepie" and "hotbod."
And at Bargaindog.com, a shopping site with more than 20 million users that is popular with middle-aged women, the most popular password was "love."
(Now, where did I put my password cracker... Ed!)
News source: The New York Times - Open Sesame: A Picture Worth 1,000 Passwords
Additional News story: The New York Times - And the password is ... Waterloo
