The Security Mentor

Use inkblots as a password hint.

It's down as I write this, but the idea Microsoft Research came up with was to present you with a series of inkblots. What you do is think of a word for what the inkblot looks like to you, which is presumably different from what someone else would think of, and then you use the first and last letter of that word as part of a password.

So if you saw a butterfly, a train, a chimney and Madonna, you'd pick a password of "bytncyMa", but you'd be able to remember it by association with the pictures. Someone else looking at the same inkblots might see a flower, a sausage, a box and Cher, so they'd pick "frsebxCr".

It's still a research project. There are lots of open questions, and the privacy statement tells you right up front that they're recording everybody's word choices. In other words, it's not for serious passwords yet. One issue I thought of immediately is that most people aren't going to think of words outside a set of a few tens of thousands at most. Most of the words you know, for example "knowledge" or "abstraction", are not going to be words you'd use to label a picture. The password therefore won't be as strong as a truly random one, and should be made longer to compensate. At an uninformed guess I'd recommend six pictures: in a little while Microsoft Research will know for sure.

This gives me an idea: your employer may forbid you to write down your password, but I bet they don't have any rules about making cryptic doodles that look like something from your preschooler. You could use a password reminder that looks like refrigerator art and as long as you put in a number and a special character you could have a strong password without having to memorize it.

Infoworld article about inkblot passwords