14 DAY TRIAL // Windows 8 comes with what Microsoft has called “Picture Password,” a brand new option specifically created to protect touch-capable devices with a visual password based on gestures.
Court Little of Solutionary, a security service provider, has offered a few tips on how to choose a better picture password for your Windows 8 device, as in many cases, the configured gestures could be easily guessed by third parties.
“Just like any other password, how good gesture passwords are depends on how those password were constructed and how much actual thought was put into creating them. To create best practices we need to think about how people read images to figure out how to avoid the visual equivalent of the word 'password' as your secure password,” Little explained in a blog post.
“For instance, good and bad pictures have points of interest (POIs). These are things that draw the eye. It could be a nose or a sight line or maybe an angry cat. Be careful using whatever first catches your attention.”
Basically, consumer should avoid using common visual gestures, such as points of interest that include faces or straight lines. At the same time, it’s not recommended to use distinct pictures or a well-composed photo.
Don’t have a gesture move from left to right, the security experts continued, and make random choices when setting up the password. In the end, you could test if your password is hard to guess or not by asking a friend to try out the first combinations that come in his mind.
A recently-conducted research, on the other hand, revealed that picture passwords are easy to crack, mostly because users do not take this kind of advice into consideration.
“Using gestures on an image as a password is a new technology. Who knows if it will catch on, but at the very least we don’t have to worry about anyone writing them down and taping them under their keyboards,” the security expert concluded.