Postby mmm » 12 Nov 2012, 22:25
New fun fact!
Right, so passwords are super important. Not just for the individual, but for our country. There are passwords that secure the names of agents overseas, passwords protecting sensitive economic data, and passwords securing our nuclear weapons.
But passwords are so outdated. All it takes is someone logging keystrokes, listening on a bugged phone, or torture. Heck, with the right computers any password is breakable. An 8 character password using uppercase, lowercase, numbers, and symbols can be broken in less than a month. So our passwords have to be longer. Experts now suggest 30+ character long passwords, and before long that character count will double. Needless to say, us humans won't take the time to memorize something that long. And what if we forget it?
So, researchers are working on making passwords you can't forget, because you don't know them in the first place.
Yes, you read that correctly.
This is possible through "implicit learning," in which the brain subconsciously learns something but is unable to consciously express it. Examples include how to swim and playing a musical piece by memory. You are only able to demonstrate your knowledge of these tasks within the tasks themselves, so you cannot tell someone how to ride a bike or play the piano.
Subjects "implicitly learn" a password by playing a game. Falling keyboard characters fall into a box labeled with the same character, guitar hero style, and you must hit that key. In other words, J falls from the top of the screen and enters the box labeled J, and you must hit the J button on your keyboard as it does so.
The letters and numbers form a password that repeats itself for more than half an hour, at which point the subject has learned the password. Even two weeks after the study was done, the subjects could still mechanically repeat (but were unable to recite) the password.
I know none of us are willing to spend 45 minutes to learn a password, but this is immediately helpful for important areas where it is worth learning a new password of such complexity. In the meantime, researchers will work on techniques so that they may reduce the time needed and increase the accuracy of subconscious passwords.

For trying.