Scientists Develop New Method To Improve Passwords

An anonymous reader writes "Scientists at Max-Planck-Institute for Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden, Germany have developed a novel method to improve password security. A strong long password is split in two parts. The first part is memorized by a human. The second part is stored as a CAPTCHA-like image of a chaotic lattice system."

Re:RTA?

[pushing-robot]

That's the one with the $5 wrench, right?

waste of verbage

[danwesnor]

The second component is transformed into a CAPTCHA image and then protected using evolution of a two-dimensional dynamical system close to a phase transition, in such a way that standard brute-force attacks become ineffective.

You don't need a bunch of mumbo jumbo to make a brute force attack ineffective, all you need to do is lock the account after x failed login attempts.

Re:Finally, some real innovation.

[icebraining]

But they fail to realize that the private key is nothing more than a lengthy password

You don't quite understand how PKI works, do you?

and is in fact more susceptible to being stolen than a human-entered password is.

Uh, no, it's not, because a private key stays in one place - you computer - while the password is sent to each server, and you have to trust them to secure it properly. Which, as we have seen with Gawker, won't happen.