Windows 8 Signing In Your Finger

Customization, Features, Security, UI - By admin on Monday, December 19, 2011 - 10:49

Signing In By Drawing On Your Screen With Your Finger

This is the most amazing news I've yet had to report about concerning Windows 8. Currently, for most of us, our working day or even or down-time browsing begins with typing in a password. For those of us who use PCs at work, this means regularly changing your password and trying to desperately remember it every single day.

It used to be quite easy, a set of say three or four passwords you'd use and re-use throughout the year. Then came the insistence you use alpha-numerical passwords, then add lower and upper case, then special characters anything to make it harder for someone else to crack your password and gain access to your PC and thus your company's network. According to Microsoft, "it can take upwards of 30 seconds to enter a long, complex password on a touch keyboard."

Let's face it, passwords can be hard work. That's why I love the latest innovation for Windows 8; picture passwords.
Basically, you choose a photo, one of your own photos too, not a set photo from Microsoft.



Then you doodle on the photo. It records your doodles and that is how you sign in. What's more, this works for mouse users too.



But, you might be thinking, couldn't anyone watching me see what I doodle and just copy it? Actually, no they couldn't, not unless they can mimic you completely. As Zach Pace a program manager on Microsoft's You Centered Experience team said: "When you draw either a circle or a line on your selected picture, Windows remembers how you drew it. So, someone trying to reproduce your picture password needs to not only know the parts of the image you highlighted and the order you did it in, but also the direction and start and end points of the circles and lines that you drew."

Why Picture Passwords?

"At its core," Zach explained, "the picture password feature is designed to highlight the parts of an image that are important to you, and it requires a set of gestures that allow you to accomplish this quickly and confidently. In order to determine the best set of gestures to use, we distributed a set of pictures to a set of study participants and asked them to highlight the parts of the image that were important to them. That’s it, no additional instructions. What we found were people doing three basic things: indicating location, connecting areas or highlighting paths, and enclosing areas. We mapped these ideas to tap, line, and circle, respectively. It’s the minimal set of gestures we found that allowed people to signify the parts of the image most important to them."

But How Does It Work?

Once you have uploaded and selected your password picture image, Windows 8 divides it into a grid with 100 segments. You then place your gestures, tap, line, circle etc on this grid and the individual points you touch, drag or tap are defined by their co-ordinate position on the grid as well as starting and end co-ordinates, direction of circle or line and the order in which your doodles occur.

"When you attempt to sign in with Picture Password," Zach explains, "we evaluate the gestures you provide, and compare the set to the gestures you used when you set up your picture password. We take a look at the difference between each gesture and decide whether to authenticate you based on the amount of error in the set. If a gesture type is wrong—it should be a circle, but instead it’s a line—authentication will always fail. When the types, ordering, and directionality are all correct, we take a look at how far off each gesture was from the ones we’ve seen before, and decide if it’s close enough to authenticate you. "

Sadly, however for those of us who were looking forward to doodling our way through our work; picture passwords are only going to be part of a password routine and will run alongside text passwords.