Picture Passwords More Secure than Text

Hugh Pickens writes "People possess a remarkable ability for recalling pictures and researchers at Newcastle University are exploiting this characteristic to create graphical passwords that they say are a thousand times more secure than ordinary textual passwords. With Draw a Secret (DAS) technology, users draw an image over a background, which is then encoded as an ordered sequence of cells. The software recalls the strokes, along with the number of times the pen is lifted. If a person chooses a flower background and then draws a butterfly as their secret password image onto it, they have to remember where they began on the grid and the order of their pen strokes. The "passpicture" is recognized as identical if the encoding is the same, not the drawing itself, which allows for some margin of error as the drawing does not have to be re-created exactly. The software has been initially designed for handheld devices such as iPhones, Blackberry and Smartphone, but could soon be expanded to other areas. "The most exciting feature is that a simple enhancement simultaneously provides significantly enhanced usability and security," says computer scientist Jeff Yan."

Meh.

I'd have to train myself to remember the strokes to draw something with the same movements and pen lifts. Sounds like a pain in the nuts to me.

Easier in Asia...

You say that, but it's EXACTLY what you have to do to learn kanji or kana... or hanzi, for the Chinese.

That's right, there's a proper way to write every one of the thousands of characters, right down to stroke order and placement.

Re:Easier in Asia...

Not only that, but people who learn it the "wrong" way quite often write it the wrong way throughout their lives. I experience this a lot with my parents -- the stroke order they learned is different from the stroke order I learned, so anytime I watch them write, it looks a bit odd.

And "shoulder surfing".

If you have to draw a picture to login, it's going to be very easy for people to see what you're drawing just by being near you.

With typed passwords that is a lot more difficult.

Re:And "shoulder surfing".

Well, they could just cover the drawing in asterisks.

Oh, wait.

Re:And "shoulder surfing".

Draw the goatse man. That'll teach them to spy on you!

Now if only I could figure out how to paste that troll's ascii in here...

Re:And "shoulder surfing".

here's the short version:

=8{O}8=

Re:And "shoulder surfing".

Okay, so something like 99% of users are going to use happy faces for their drawn password. That'd be so difficult to crack.

Re:And "shoulder surfing".

...And then get the password is too short error...

SHA

But on the subject of security, how would these passwords be stored? One nice thing with plaintext is that you never have to store anyone's actual password, only the hash of it. I suppose you could still create a hash of "1. stroke 47degrees 3%, 2, stroke 270degrees 22%" or whatever the password device spits out, but it seems to me that as this system requires a more sophisticated way of interpreting fuzzily matched movements, there might be problems with this approach or it could introduce weaknesses.

You could use some algorithm to simplify the users drawing, rounding angles (I punned! :D ), adjusting lengths, perhaps. But this would probably have the effect of narrowing the password space making it easier to crack the passwords. I'm not an expert in this area, I'd be interested to know if they've thought about this or if anyone else knows a bit more about it.

Re:Meh.

Ordinary people have been doing this for hundreds of years. It's called a SIGNATURE.

Re:Meh.

That doesn't really change the original statement. It would indeed be a horrific accident that turned him into a quadrupole, and it would probably be hard to draw stuff afterwards.

Re:Meh.

I could get that dolphin that they taught to paint (look it up) to sign my signature on a check and the bank would still take it. It doesn't even have to be words or letters. As long as someone scribbled my signature, they're not going to reject it so the check's good. Signatures aren't quite the same thing.
Now my 2 cents, I just design security systems that are so freaky and confusing that hackers just give up because it's too odd. The hacker or otherwise bad person just gives up and is like "wtf is it, broke or just haunted?" If someone made a software suite where you can design your own ridiculous security system with basically unlimited possibilities of whatever the user can dream up, people would have some pretty ridiculous security! Everyone here always complains about security through obscurity. You try opening a ridiculously large-bit-encryption archive file of mine when at the "enter the password" screen, you have to wave the cursor over the password field then type submit in it and click the exit button which reveals a crossword puzzle with only one valid word in it but you have to in fact click the squares so the highlighted letters form a smiley face then within 3 seconds, click on the password field then press tab three times which is the only wat to get you to the now unlocked, real invisible password entry box and type your password in stutter type (doubles of each letter followed by a backspace) and then press the red X in the top right to submit it and open the archive. You aren't getting into that archive! That's so screwy, someone would give up trying to figure out what the hell was going on in minutes. And good luck brute forcing it cuz that'll take all the computers on earth a couple hundred trillion years. Plus it's not that hard of a process to remember when you really think about it. It'd take someone who memorized it like 15 seconds tops to do it all and even if someone watched it, they'd have trouble remembering it or understanding it. They'd have to have a camera recording your keyboard and mouse synchronized with another camera watching the screen and also be able to guess the time requirements. Do all that with an incrementing password (like fishfish2 then next time it's fishfish3) at the end of it and they'd barely be able to solve it if you told them every step. Waaaaaaay better and more secure than drawing a picture on a low res grid.

Re:Meh.

Sounds like a pain in the nuts to me.

You're doing it wrong.

Prior Art

The movie "Safe House" with Patrick Stewart had something similar.

I've heard this before

From Article:

graphical passwords that they say are a thousand times more secure than ordinary textual passwords.

Someone a long time ago:

A picture is worth a thousand words

Why am I having nightmares...

...about drawing penises on goatse photographs?

That would be one way to keep things secure though - it's hard for someone to guess your pass picture if they can't bring themselves to look at the background... :)

I dont think so

I doubt this will really work, most people when they draw and write so it slightly diffrent each time. They may have to sit down and aim exactly and prepare which will take too much effort for most people. I doubt this will take off its the old security vs convenience. At this point ill take the convenience of a text password.

Sounds hard

I can't even consistently write my signature, let alone some arbitrary picture.

Normal signature

A normal signature is a picture drawn in a certain fashion with a specific flow and strokes.
We have had signature recognition for a while.
Whats new?

Damnable Security!

I wonder how many users will just end up drawing Stars, Hearts, and Smiley Faces?

Re:Damnable Security!

I smell pictionary attacks!!

Imagine pictures of common passwords/objects being drawn everywhere on the screen at different rotations and scales in rapid succession.. or just a brute forcer which didn't even make legible images 99% of the time

2 characters.

Or you could add 2 alpha-numeric characters to an existing text password, for more than 1000 times security.

Re:2 characters.

Adding two alphanumeric characters (a-z, A-Z, 0-9, for 62 characters) would increase the keyspace by a lot (a factor of 3,844, to be precise), but it doesn't increase overall security by that much except against brute force attackers. It certainly doesn't make it a thousand times harder to shoulder-surf, or keylog, or social engineer, or...

More Secure?

It seems to me that this would drastically increase the security of passwords from attack by machines but would make them more susceptible to attack from humans.

There are only so many places to start drawing your password on a picture and a human would recognize that. People would probably draw birds in the sky and dogs on the ground, right? Also, I would guess that people would make linear leaps with their pictures: someone will draw a bird, and not a fish, in a picture of a tree.

That said, I'm not saying that this isn't a worthwhile endeavor, just that it wouldn't necessarily be as secure as it looks at first glance.

Easy dictionary attack

How many people will use a picture password of a stick man, tree, or a happy sun?

As nice as this sounds...

...the reality is that this story should probably be tagged 'security through never-being-able-to-access-your-stuff-again'

Two serious problems

1. An artistically-inclined person looking over your shoulder might be able to draw your image about as well as you can. With a conventional keyboard password, I can block the keyboard with my body so others can't see what I'm typing, and I can pretend to press keys that aren't in my password so even if they can see, they are thrown off. There is less you can do to block a screen you have to look at to draw properly.

2. Some people's hands shake when they've had too much caffeine, most people's fingers get stiff when they've been out in the cold, and some people have degenerative diseases which make typing a one-letter-at-a-time proposition. Drawing would be very difficult in all of these circumstances. Perhaps this is why TFA says that 5% of users couldn't recreate their image within three attempts a week after first coming up with it.

I don't think this technology is going anywhere any time soon.

New password == old password?

8==D

Who'd have guessed you could use the same password in both systems?

Re:New password == old password?

Password isn't long enough.

And that's from the graphical login system! :P

DDR Passwords

At least my idea for a Dance, Dance, Revolution password authentication scheme is still intact.

Patent pending, patent pending, patent pending.

Been there. Done that.

If you remove the background picture and the act of displaying what you draw to everyone within eye-shot, I've already done that at http://shaunwagner.com/index.html?page=Projects%2FJavascript%2FMouse+Password [shaunwagner.com]

Does it work? No. It is far too difficult to draw the same image twice without seeing what you are drawing. If you can see what you are drawing, so can everyone else - then they can draw the same image.

minimum requirements

Oh no:

Password too simple. Password must be at least 8 strokes with at least one diagonal one and one wiggly one.

Massive Cocks

I can already see the movie scene where they crack the chief of the FBI's laptop by guessing his pictogram.

Stacey: Try drawing a massive cock..

Arnie: I'm in. Lets get to work

Re:I don't belive it.

Yes. Also the picture will require at least one instance each of cross-hatching, scumbling, and stippling.