CAPTCHA's With Chaos: Strong Protection For Weak Passwords

April 23, 2011 - PRLog -- The passwords of the future could become more secure, and at the same time, simpler to use. This was stated in a news report of Science Daily published yesterday.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex s-Systems in Dresden have been inspired by the physics of critical phenomena in their attempts to significantly improve password protection.The researchers split the password into 2 sections. With the first, easy to memorize section they encrypt a CAPTCHA (completely automated public Turing test to tell computers and humans apart)-an image that computer programs person have difficulty in deciphering. The researchers also make it more difficult for computers, whose task it is to automatically crack passwords, to read the passwords without authorization.

They use images of a simulated physical system, which they additionally make unrecognizable with a chaotic process. These CAPTCHAs enable the Dresden physicists to achieve a high level of password protection, even though the user need only remember a weak password.

Computers sometimes use brute force. Hacking programs use so-called brute-force attacks to try out all possible character combination to guess passwords. CAPTCHAs are therefore, intended as an additional safeguard the input of which originates from a human being and not from a machine.They pose a task for the user which is simple enough for any human, yet very difficult for a program. Users must enter a distorted text which is displayed on the screen. CAPTCHAs are increasingly being bypassed. Personal data of members of social networking for school pupils have already been stolen in this way.

Researchers at the Max Planck Institute for the Physics of Complex Systems in Dresden have now developed a new type of password protection that is based on a combination of characters. They also use mathematical methods from the physics of critical phenomena to protect the CAPTCHA from being accessed by computers.

The Dresden-based researchers initially combine password and CAPTCHA in a completely novel way. It's no longer generated a new each time in order to distinguish the human user from a computer on a case-by-case basis. Rather, the physicists use the code word in the image, which can only be deciphered by humans as the real password which provides access to a social network or an online bank account, for example.The researchers additionally encrypt this password using a combination of characters.

"The character combination we use to encrypt the password in the CAPTCHA can be very easy to remember," explains the expert. "We thus take account of the fact that most people only want to, or can only, remember simple passwords,"

The fact that the passwords are correspondingly weak is now no longer important, because the real protection comes from the encrypted password in the CAPTCHA.
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