[109421] in Cypherpunks
CDR: Re: Simplicity (fwd)
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Jim Choate)
Tue Mar 23 17:28:10 1999
From: Jim Choate <ravage@einstein.ssz.com>
To: cypherpunks@einstein.ssz.com
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 16:14:02 -0600 (CST)
Reply-To: Jim Choate <ravage@einstein.ssz.com>
----- Forwarded message from Nicholas Cravotta -----
Date: Tue, 23 Mar 1999 16:20:16 -0500
From: Nicholas Cravotta <cravotta@compuserve.com>
Subject: CDR: Re: Simplicity
Sorry for the misunderstanding about cognometrics. Cognometrics refers only to passwords,
not to encryption or keys. The idea is to create different kinds of passwords
not based on alphanumeric characters. For example, one company uses faces
to create a password. You select a combination of four faces from among
several hundred choices. Supposedly you will remember faces easier than
random alphanumeric characters. When it comes time to enter your password,
the system will offer you nine faces from which you pick the first face, and so
on for each of the four faces. By offering several hundred faces, the company proports that
it will be harder to crack (4^100) than choosing from 10 digits. (This particular
system is easy to break: you know that the correct face is one of the nine.
Since the other eight are random, by failing several times, you can notice
which single face appeared in every query for the first face, thus giving you
the first face.)
----- End of forwarded message from Nicholas Cravotta -----
For machines with a GUI login screen one could take Clifford Pickovers work
on parameterized faces (ie computed happy faces) in one of his books (might
be Computers, Pattern, Chaos, & Beauty but I'm not at home to check). He
even includes some basic pseudo-code.
His original idea was to use them to display multi-variant data sets in a
manner that was intuitive. I've only played with it a tad but it looks good.
____________________________________________________________________
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