Disclaimer

The content of this blog is my personal opinion only. Although I am an employee - currently of Nvidia, in the past of other companies such as Iagination Technologies, MIPS, Intellectual Ventures, Intel, AMD, Motorola, and Gould - I reveal this only so that the reader may account for any possible bias I may have towards my employer's products. The statements I make here in no way represent my employer's position, nor am I authorized to speak on behalf of my employer. In fact, this posting may not even represent my personal opinion, since occasionally I play devil's advocate.

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Thursday, March 08, 2012

Different device inputs => different passwords, different writing styles

I am probably not the only one to notice that the reasonably secure passwords I type fairly easily on my PC, or even with handwriting recognition on my Windows tablet, can be really painful to type on an iPhone or tablet with onscreen keyboard.

? Will there be a rash of security breakins because smartphone and tablet passwords are too easily broken?  Or at least the subset of easy typing common to both PCs and portable devices?

Today added a new device: a Kindle with keyboard.  Not the latest and greatest, but okay. I love the battery life.  I can access my wiki using the experimental web browser. But the keyboard... sheesh, I force myself to write in a different style. "Zero" rather than "0".

Still, nice when its the only device I have.

(And, yes, I have 2 Android tablets - and I prefer the Kindle. e-Paper. Battery life.)

2 comments:

Wayne said...

yeah funky passwords are a pain with on-screen keyboards.

this helps: http://xkcd.com/936/

Andy "Krazy" Glew said...

Ah, so you're a member of the "4 words" school of pass phrases? Now, although I fall on the other side of that meme - I like Steve Gibson's password haystacks myself - it may be necessary to deal with funky keyboards.

Unfortunately, I still also deal with systems that have an UPPER limit on the password length. So the usual pass phrases often do not fit.