Recognizing Your Own Handwriting As A Password

Gary writes "A new online authentication system called Dynahand could make logging in to websites a little easier. With Dynahand, users simply identify their own handwriting, instead of entering a cryptic password or buying a biometric device to scan their fingerprints. The user's handwriting samples contain only digits, since numerals are harder for an outside party to recognize than letters are. The digits displayed are random, so the handwriting is the only clue to the correct answer."

How about poor geeks like me...

...who virtually cannot write by hand anymore? I can't even write a proper signature, haven't been using hand writing since I was playing RPGs 10+ years ago.

I'd say it would be pretty hard to determine how my digits would look like.

Re:How about poor geeks like me...

my digits looks like this:
012345679 (bitstream vera sans)

Re:How about poor geeks like me...

It's a bad call if it's the only authentication entry, but if it's in addition to something else it might be good. Many banks seem to be going for the 'something you know, and something you recognize' auth motif (banking as one example, where you recognize and identify a preselected word or graphic.) Maybe soon for really secure accounts, we'll have a fairly painless set of layers, ala: something you have - the random PIN cards, something you know - pword, something you i.d. - (handwriting/picture/word)?

Brute Force?

This would make brute-forcing a password a little easier..

An attacker could simply select a hand writing at random till they get the right one.

TFA doesn't say anything about that.

Re:Brute Force?

To anwser my own question, I found a better article:

http://www.technologyreview.com/Infotech/18986/ [technologyreview.com]

Re:Brute Force?

From parent post's link:

Renaud doesn't think Dynahand is secure enough for protecting sensitive information, such as bank accounts or health records. Rather, she believes it could be useful for social sites, where a user wants her account to be private but where nothing disastrous would happen if someone broke into it.

The folks at Dynahand obviously don't know how bad hijacking someone's social network identity could be. While not as sensitive as banking or medical information, access to one's online profile is a pretty sensitive thing. A person pretending to be you on MySpace or Facebook could cause all kinds of damage to your reputation, lose you (real) friends, and leave an incriminating trail for any future employer to find. Even if you are able to regain control of your account via customer service, and could remove the offending material from your page, nothing is every really deleted from the Internet.

Re:Brute Force?

Why bother? My desk is covered with my clearly recognizable scrawl, and most of it is numeric just to add insult to injury.

While the idea of a system that depends on recognition is interesting (though in my mind, not terribly secure for the exact reason you stated), handwriting is probably the poorest example because we leave handwriting samples everywhere. It'd be much more secure to have the system be "Recognize a picture of your own genitalia" because at least then you only have to worry about former significant others...And hell, for this crowd, you don't even have to worry about that.

Re:Brute Force?

That's the greatest caught masturbating at work coverup I've ever heard.

Re:Brute Force?

It'd be much more secure to have the system be "Recognize a picture of your own genitalia" because at least then you only have to worry about former significant others...

Why do you hate nudists and porn stars?

...And hell, for this crowd, you don't even have to worry about that.

Speak for yourself, I'm quite positive that several hundred people have seen my genitalia. Though I'm not sure they got a good enough look to be able to identify me in the short time my trenchcoat was open.

Re:Brute Force?

Was entirely joking. Besides, wrt the genitalia of the slashdot multitudes, I thought we had all decided that security through obscurity was useless?

Giving out your phone number is risky...

This is the most stupid authentication mechanism I've ever heard of. Apart from people probably not recognising their own handwriting, there is nothing stopping others from analysing someone else's handwriting and gaining access to their accounts.

Slow news day, I guess.

Re:Giving out your phone number is risky...

Exactly. In the old days, someone would have to find the stickynote on one's monitor that specifically had one's password written on it. Under this scheme, any stickynote at all will do!

Original, but...

Very cool and original idea... but I definitely wouldn't use it over passwords on anything important.

Picking and choosing = bad

As novel as this whole handwriting angle is, doesn't this just amount to a multiple-choice test? There's always the off-chance of some random stranger getting in by sheer luck.

Additionally, that's not taking into account the massive amounts of ways someone could get samples of your handwriting. Besides the obvious garbage-picking, things like tax returns, property deeds, or other legal forms can often be public information, and there's a good chance you've written numbers on one at some point.

If you know the person...

I am not a cracker. I am not a phisher. I do not try to get into random people's accounts.

I can't help thinking that IF I ever did try to get into someone else's account, it would be to spy on or get revenge on someone I know. (Really, that isn't something I do. This is a big IF). In those cases, this would surely be so much easier. For example, I am sure I would recognise my family's handwriting.

I certainly remember, when I was a secondary school maths teacher, having to work out who had produces a certain piece of work by recognising the handwriting. Obviously, being maths work, this usually involved recognising digits.

Sometimes, simple is best

Passwords actually strike me as quite a good security method. A good password is difficult to guess by a person or by a machine and is very simple to implement, leaving less margin for error in the technology.

I know, I know, people forget their passwords or choose the word "password" all the time. It still seems a little depressing that we have to use all this extra trickery to compensate for people being morons.

Peter

Re:Sometimes, simple is best

I know, I know, people forget their passwords or choose the word "password" all the time. It still seems a little depressing that we have to use all this extra trickery to compensate for people being morons.

Users aren't always just morons. I know a person who has to keep track of 9 unique passwords with at least 3 different usernames, most of which are used once a week or less. All the systems have minimum length and complexity requirements, 90-day expiration and permanent lock-out if an account gets just three failed logins in a row. In his case it is potentially a go to jail offense to write down these passwords ANYWHERE, even in some sort of encrypted form.

In cases like that, the real morons are the people pushing their authentication complexity onto the users, not the users themselves.

Totally utterly useless on 2 counts

1. It's a shared secret. That's all. I was going to say "no better, no worse", but actually it's made significantly worse by being multiple choice.
2. Doesn't prevent MITM in any way whatsoever

Now the biometric of someone's typing rythm strikes me as a good thing, along with "PC fingerprinting" and trend analysis, but this suggestion is significantly worse than what we already have available on the market.

"3/10 - see me" would be my mark for this particular gem.

Re:Totally utterly useless on 2 counts

biometric of someone's typing rythm strikes me as a good thing

Haven't we been over this? That system assumes that you are always logging in at the same level of drunk - that's not feasible.

WTF

I've got a simpler idea, why don't we just ask people a simple true/false question. I've got the first:

A single html radio-button form-based multiple choice question is a reasonable security measure.
A) True
B) False

But I think there should be an option "C," though that would make this not a real t/f question:
C) WTF?!

seriously...

how on earth did anyone ever think this was a good idea? Finding samples of someone having written down numbers is not hard by any stretch of the imagination. As someone already pointed out, simply asking someone to write down a phone number for you, not even necessarily theirs, would get you such a sample. Sometimes people can be pretty dumb.

Re:seriously...

Because it wouldn't help them.

Almost 15 years ago, I was working on a demo system for a more secure way of issuing benefit payments (at the time, the payee had a paper booklet, and there was quite a lot of trouble with stolen booklets). We investigated what we could practically put on a smart card (similar type of smart card as what is in modern credit cards). One of the things we investigated was signature recognition.

We had a system that did it extremely well, well enough that we never managed to forge another person just signing with an "X". The system not only looked at the shape of the writing, but the way the person wrote - the speed, accelerations, stroke weight etc. The genuine user could be recognised even if they signed fairly scruffily (the system didn't return 'true' or 'false', but rather a confidence). However, another person even if they signed their X to LOOK as much as the original person's X looked would get a very low confidence score.

This was almost 15 years ago - the technology was pretty damned good (but quite expensive) at the time. We managed to get the signature, the person's details and a photograph onto the smart cards of the day (I think they had 8K of storage). The signature took up 1K.

have to hide my hand writing?

What, now I have to bring a typewriter everytime I go to the restaurant - to fill in the tip and total?

Wrong direction

They should instead be requiring the use of a graphics tablet or Tablet PC and requiring the user to write a given number sequence --- then they get the additional input of speed, pressure, stroke order / direction which makes things reasonably secure (even a person who can forge another's writing isn't likely to get all of the above as consistent as a person using their normal hand).

Doesn't even require much more from the user in the way of hardware (trades off a scanner for a graphics tablet).

William

How?

I can't even recognize my own handwriting half the time.

Uh what's the point?

Like some security expert has said: just write down your passwords onto a small piece of paper and keep them in your wallet/handbag.

If you lose your wallet/handbag, call up the banks to cancel your cards etc, call up the rest to cancel your passwords.

You're keeping it in a fairly secure place.

Old idea and a badly implemented one at that

Back in the late 80's, a UK bank did some R&D on this area and came up with a novel idea. It was signature recognition BUT rather than analysing the actual signature, it 'listened' to the pen on the paper as it moved. They found that anyone (well.. some people anyway) could do a fair replication of someone else's signature if they went slowly but it was almost impossible to recreate someone's signature at the same speed and with the same pressure/flourishes.
In case anyone reads this and copyrights the damn thing, there is prior art and it worked. They just didn't think the market was ready for it.

Ok, but what happens when...

... You get an injury that makes your hand writing change, like a bad break in the hand, or a stroke or something? I am sure you could answer the secret question or whatever, but you have to ask, how consistent is handwriting that a program could use it to authenticate a person?

What a stupid concept

Here's how you crack it:

1. generate a bunch of new sessions to the login page.
2. Identify samples that appear more often than others.
3. Recognize the handwriting style.
4. Log in.

I'm screwed

My wife's been signing my name on checks and documents for years.(Yes, I know...)
I don't even think I can remember what my name is anymore anyway...

computer recognize my handwriting?

wouldn't it be more effective to have the computer recognize my handwriting, i.e. I write something and the computer goes "yep, thats the guy"? That way, the computer would know it was me w/o a password, and it wouldn't just be multiple choice or whatever. Of course, handwriting recognition is really, really hard to do quickly and effectively enough to narrow down between thousands/millions of users compared with a password.

Recognizing Your Own Face As A Password

For immediate release.

Slashdot, USA. A new online authentication system called Dynaface could make logging in to websites a little easier. With Dynaface, users simply identify their own face, instead of entering a cryptic password or buying a biometric device to scan their fingerprints. The user's sample photographs are made under a variety of hair styles and lighting conditions, since the shape and other characteristics of a person's face are harder for an outside party to recognize than hair and lighting is. The lighting and hairstyle used are random, so the shape of the face is the only clue to the correct answer."

How about typical credential operations?

There is no improvement here over biometrics or other credentials falling into the “something you are” category. How do you revoke this credential? How do you limit its scope? I would even argue this is worse than a password because it is not easily changed, and worse, your signature is very public. Consider how many documents you have floating around with your hand-written signature on it. You really want to use something that can be learned and easily reproduced as a secret? Nonsense. We need real solutions (OpenID [wikipedia.org] is a start), not rehashes or regressions of old schemes.

would not work for me

Clearly, they have never seen my writing. No one is able to identify it, least of all me! Really..I never know how it will look. I can just imagine being trapped out of all my sites!

This isn't handwriting recognition!

Half the replies so far assume that you have to supply a sample of your handwriting every time you log in. That's not what this system does!
This system just presents a few lines of handwriting, and invites you to choose the correct one. A useless system, basically reducing security to a 1-in-10 guess. This is supposed to be developed by a university?

I am a doctor,

you insensitive clods!

I suggest "DynaRant" instead

With Dynahand, users simply identify their own handwriting

I suggest a system that recognizes your political views. It would display "Iraq", "Immigration" or "Global Warming" etc., you would react furiously, and it would recognize your personal opinions.

This would be much simpler than the proposed scheme, as no real Internet user ever writes by hand, but most are expert at spouting loony political gibberish.

I'd be locked out of all my logins

My signature is worse than the worst doctor's handwriting that you can imagine. In 8th grade, when reports were still mostly handwritten, my teacher insisted I started printing because my cursive was atrocious. Printing wasn't much better. I'm very happy to do everything electronically now.

My signature is never the same twice because I just write too fast and too frantically. Handwriting analysts would have a conniption trying to determine if my signature was real or forged. A security program would do a core dump trying to verify my signature is correct.

Such a security program above would be impractical for someone like me.

False positives

Someone already pointed the typing rhythm method of identifying an user. This method suffers from exactly the same problem : there is a large number of factors that can modify one's handwriting or typing rhythm. Drinking alcohol (even as little as in your average beer can) may completely bar you from accessing your typing-rhythm-protected account (read that somewhere a few years ago). I'm guessing even a minor hand or finger injury will probably change your handwriting as well.

Good

While I don't like this for security purposes, but if this is 100% accurate we are one huge step forward in the art of OCR. As a Project Gutenberg volunteer, I can't wait for the day when I can scan something and OCR will get it 100% correct. 1 l 0 O etc.

Weak.

I just want to sign up, write something, and have the password security indicator tell me I provided weak handwriting.

Hand Writing???

How quaint. Seriously, I can't remember the last time I wrote by hand.

Good.

A new online authentication system called Dynahand could make logging in to websites a little easier.

I've always found that quickly typing in a six character password to access simple websites was far too difficult.

Use photos

Just make an institution that wants to verify you, send you cut-outs of faces of several hundreds of family pictures that you've taken over the years. The pictures should be analog and old, so that they won't have been on a facebook-like site. Also, have them make you write a random story, in pen, the individual sentennces of which will be presented back to you. Mix everything up with everything else, distort a little, and present back to the user when they want to log in. Postfix with user-chosen password and small-device based challenge-response. Separate actions with separate verifications. Should all in all take almost half an hour now, but verified you are !

School hands

Well, I can't write. I did my degree before they had word processors (or at least before they were ubiquitous) and for that I learned to handwrite and then immediately forgot. When I want to write 'CAT' I have to think about how I'm going to make the A -- sometimes I make it an upside down U with a line, sometimes it's more like a capital delta. I know I'm not alone(*).

My wife has a much worse problem, though. She was taught to write according to an exact model, with iron-hard discipline and years of training. Every single person who learned to write in her town in that decade uses EXACTLY the same writing.

If only there were some way to authenticate based not on something which changes even when you don't want it to (like how you write), nor on something that can't be changed even when you need to (like your fingertips). If only we could use some kind of mental trace that the user is aware of but that nobody else can perceive -- maybe a word or other sequence of symbols stored in the actual brain itself.

That'd rock. But the technology is probably decades away.

(*)In terms of handwriting. Spiritually, I may well be alone... so very very alone... *bursts into tears at desk*

Not so good

Let's see, not content with excluding only the blind, they have also decided to exclude those who can't use their hands, those with a more or less random tremor, and those of us who never write anything quite the same way twice.

They should try MY new authentication scheme. It displays a randomly generated question and based on your answer chooses exactly which insulting message to return before refusing access. Nobody will ever break in! It excludes everyone equally so you don't face a discrimination suit. Finally, now that everyone is locked out, it saves the trouble of actually implementing anything else. I'll call it SuperUltraMegaWeb 3.0 That should get the vc rolling in!

More precisely

Shouldn't the headline say "use handwriting as a authentication credential" instead of saying "use handwriting as a password"? A password is a credential, but a credential isn't always a password.

Nothing to see here ...

From the article's first paragraph:

You can't afford to be careless regarding the password coz you never know ...

And with that, I stopped reading. Why? Because I don't have enough time to read things that aren't written in at least passable English. If someone has a good idea, and are serious about it, they'll make the effort to communicate it well or have it communicated well for them.

Nothing to see in this article, and, by strong implication, a worthless idea.

I probably wouldn't pass.

Not sure I would pass it. My job allows me to see handwriting samples from hundreds of different people, including myself, and it's not uncommon to find someone else who's handwriting is so similar to mine that I thought it was mine until I looked at the name on it.

The Real Solution[tm]

This really sounds like a rather useless toy solution, since its easily cracked by brute force or if they make it secure enough to not be crackable, it would be a hell of a lot more uncomfortable then a real password.

Anyway, I think the real solution is much easier and already half the way implemented: Email!

On almost each and every side where you login with a password, you have to register your email address. If you lose your password, you let yourself send a new one via email. So in reality there is only one password for everything and that is the one that protects your email account, all the other passwords are really just placeholder that can be changed and recovered at will once you have access to the email account. So why not automate that process? The server where you request a login, sends some magic-string to your email account and you then use that magic-string to authenticate to your server account. If normal email doesn't feel secure enough, use GPG and friends. While this might be not so perfect with a normal mail client, the whole process could be fully automated, all the magic-strings that you get by mail could automatically be fetched and then used by your webbrowser, so that you would just have to click 'login' on a webpage instead of typing a password. Your email hoster would become an authentication server.

The only downside I see is that you might not want to use your email account on an untrustworthy client, while some blogs comment system password would be invaluable enough to use it there, but that should be solvable by either using secondary less important email addresses then your primary one or by allowing restricted access to your email account via an alternative password.

How can this work?

First, if this method has to work (even remotely), then (a) the number of choices have to be large or (b) the choices have to be a bit similar so that only a well trained eye could tell them apart. Problems: (a) I dont have the f***ing time to scroll down a huge list of choices to look for my numbers (b) IMHO, a good number of people will have trouble with telling apart numbers that look fairly similar to your own writing. Results: (a) anyone can get thru with a couple of guesses or (b) I need to spend a good 30 minutes searching for my numbers or retrying --- Too much research can be injurious to common sense. (I have my up-side-down writing pen to prove it)

Graffiti and writing

I see a few sarcastic and funny comments about /. geeks no longer knowing what handwriting is. But there is a phenomenon that I experienced, that I was always curious about.

I was an early Palm adopter, and learned Graffiti. I used it heavily for taking all my notes, appointements, and such. Found I didn't use paper much any more.

And when I did finally use paper on the odd occasion, I found my handwriting tended towards Graffiti-esque scribblings, than traditional handwriting... It wouldn't have been so bad if it wasn't such a moving target. With licensing issues, Graffiti changed, and Windows CE used a different variation, and so on. I feel like my writing has been pooched because of it.

Has anyone else experienced this? I do feel like the original Graffiti was an ingenious optimization of handwriting for the purposes of recognition. I almost wish it had become the "esperanto" of hand writing.

I'm curious as to whether or not others have experienced this...

Re:Bad idea

I could quite easily recognize my own...But so could anyone else who has ever seen it. Then there are those people with bland, unmemorable handwriting...How would you pick your handwriting out of a crowd when your handwriting looks like handwriting is supposed to look.

Additionally, the number of samples would have to be constrained to what a normal person could be expected to go through, so the odds of someone being able to guess it are huge. I mean, I could set my password to the crappy "Guess,15" and it would take millions of brute force guesses to figure it out, as opposed to checking 20 something handwriting samples.

Re:Good luck

You sound like me, I never sign the same way twice.