All you see are asterisks whenever you enter passwords on the Internet. This makes it near impossible to make sure the correct password has been entered. The only indicator is the length of the password, but that works best for short passwords and not so good for larger more secure ones as it takes time to count the characters entered.
Visual Hashing, a new add-on for the Firefox web browser and extension for Chrome, changes this by adding visual password reminders to password prompts on the Internet.
The idea is simple: Generate a hash code for a password the user enters, and visualize that hash with four colors in the password field.
The user recognizes the colors over time, and gets a confirmation that the right password has been entered right on the screen.
Using the add-on may be somewhat confusing at the beginning, as new colors appear whenever you add or remove a char from the entered password.
Visual Hashing basically helps you in making sure that you do not enter a wrong password in password fields on the Internet.
Visual Hashing integrates well into most sites. It works for instance on Twitter, Facebook and Google properties. The four colors begin to appear after you have entered the first character of the user password. This works both on sign-up forms and on sign-in forms.
The developer is currently thinking about adding new features to the add-on. Among the options could be a password hint that indicates whether the password is correct or not, or options to keep track of passwords that are being reused to inform the user about the dangers of it.
Colors will always appear slightly different to avoid password hash information leaking out through screenshots. The color differences are not recognizable to the human eye.
Firefox users can download Visual Hashing from the official Mozilla Firefox add-on repository, Chrome users from the Chrome Web Store.
Source code and additional information are available on the developer’s blog.
© Martin Brinkmann for gHacks Technology News | Latest Tech News, Software And Tutorials, 2011. | Permalink |
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Post tags: firefox add-ons, google chrome extensions, passwords
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