[109441] in Cypherpunks
Re: Simplicity
daemon@ATHENA.MIT.EDU (Bill Stewart)
Wed Mar 24 11:06:48 1999
Date: Wed, 24 Mar 1999 01:52:20 -0800
To: Mok-Kong Shen <mok-kong.shen@stud.uni-muenchen.de>,
Nicholas Cravotta <cravotta@compuserve.com>
From: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
Cc: "David C. Oshel" <dcoshel@pobox.com>, cypherpunks@algebra.com,
aucrypto@suburbia.net
In-Reply-To: <36F89EA4.56D9DB4C@stud.uni-muenchen.de>
Reply-To: Bill Stewart <bill.stewart@pobox.com>
www.id-arts.com (They gave out a Rubik's Cube with faces pasted on it
as a trinket at the RSA show :-)
They contend that it's about as many combinations as a bank PIN,
but more secure because it's very hard for most people to
adequately describe faces to other people, so you can
remember your set of passfaces but can't easily share them
or be coerced into revealing them.
Their trade show folks weren't very mathematical,
but didn't really understand about making their toolkits
general-purpose rather than special-purpose.
I don't know if it bothers with encryption,
and it can use Java or ActiveX for the browser connection (not a good sign),
but they've got a white paper on their web site talking about SPEKE,
so perhaps they're doing things somewhat well technically
>> 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
At 09:13 AM 3/24/99 +0100, Mok-Kong Shen wrote:
>In a discussion group sometime ago someone claimed that IBM has a very
>generalpatent that covers the said face recognition system. Do you
>happen to have information on that? Could you give the name of the
>company employing that technique?
Thanks!
Bill
Bill Stewart, bill.stewart@pobox.com
PGP Fingerprint D454 E202 CBC8 40BF 3C85 B884 0ABE 4639
