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Windows 8‘s newest feature yet that Windows 7 and other major operating systems won’t have is to allow users to sign into their accounts with picture password. Before you say, “Hey, that doesn’t seem to be that secure,” it turns out Microsoft is coupling touch gestures with picture password so it won’t be too easy as in just selecting the correct picture password. If I’m not straying too far from facts, then each user should be able to log in faster with picture password by gesturing with at least three different touch gestures on a specific picture password.
Administrators can turn off the picture password feature if they favor text password feature. To prevent hackers from illegally attaining easy remote login, Windows 8 automatically disables picture password for remote login. It makes sense, users should be able to have a way to log in to their accounts faster and less problematic but still be considered as secure as usual, and so Microsoft’s answer is picture password for local network only.
I’m hoping Microsoft would add one more layer of security such as simple pin number or face recognition or voice recognition just to make logging into one’s account would be even more secure. Of course, face and voice recognitions aren’t hard to hack, because hackers could always photo someone’s face and record someone’s voice to bypass face and voice password recognitions. This is why I think such additional password recognition measures are good only if these are coupling with each other in layers. This way hackers must attain more than one things to bypass the layers of authentication.
I think it’s a good thing if users don’t have to remember long text passwords, because they might write down long passwords and leave such passwords in obvious places that anyone could have access to their passwords, consequently defeating the whole purpose of strong passwords. I think Windows 8′s picture password feature might not be adequate in protecting users’ logins even though Windows 8 is coupling picture with touch gestures to create stronger picture password. This is why I emphasize that picture password and touch gesture combination as an authentication method for Windows 8′s new password feature might need one or more layers of authentication such as face recognition. As long the additional layers of authentication are accurate and fast to execute, I don’t see there will be a problem of allowing users to log into their accounts fast, safe, and easy.
Source: http://www.ghacks.net/2011/12/17/windows-8-to-support-picture-passwords/
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Vinh Nguyen
