Hash Visualization: a New Technique to improve Real-World Security

Current security systems su er from the fact that they fail to account for human factors. This paper considers two human limitations: First, people are slow and unreliable when comparing meaningless strings; and second, people have di culties in remembering strong passwords or PINs. We identify two applications where these human factors negatively a ect security: Validation of root keys in public-key infrastructures, and user authentication. Our approach to improve the security of these systems is to use hash visualization, a technique which replaces meaningless strings with structured images. We examine the requirements of such a system and propose the prototypical solution Random Art . We also show how to apply hash visualization to improve the real-world security of root key validation and user authentication.