Picture password is a new way to sign in to Windows 8 that is currently in the Developer Preview. Let’s go behind the scenes and see how secure this is and how it was built. One of the neat things about the availability of a touch screen is that it provides an opportunity to look at a new way to sign in to your PC. While many of us might prefer to remove the friction of getting to a PC by running without a password, for most of us, and in most situations this is not the case or is at least unwise. Providing a fast and fluid mechanism to sign in with touch is super important, and we all know that using alpha passwords on touch-screen phones is cumbersome. This post is authored by Zach Pace, a program manager on our You Centered Experience team, and looks at the implementation and security of picture password in Windows 8. Just as a note, you can also use a mouse with picture password too, just by using some click and/or drag actions.The experience of signing in to your PC with touch has traditionally been a cumbersome one. In a world with increasingly strict password requirements—with numbers, symbols, and capitalization—it can take upwards of 30 seconds to enter a long, complex password on a touch keyboard. We have a strong belief that your experience with Windows 8 should be both fast and fluid, and that starts when you sign in.
--Steven
Other touch experiences in the marketplace have tried to tackle this problem, with the canonical example being a numeric PIN. A PIN is a great solution: Almost everyone has seen or used one before, and a keypad is simple to use with touch. We knew though, that there was room to improve.
A numeric combination often presents a problem for people because the sequences easiest to remember are typically the least secure. Common number sequences—like 1111, or 1234—are troublesome, but PINs that are composed of common well-known personal dates can also be deduced if an attacker has personal knowledge of the person (much of which is not hard to obtain). In such a case, the number being personal to a person can work against its security. We set out to change the paradigm here: we designed a fast and fluid touch sign-in experience that is also personal to you.
A personal sign-in experience
At its core, your picture password is comprised of two complimentary parts. There is a picture from your picture collection and a set of gestures that you draw upon it. Instead of having you pick from a canned set of Microsoft images, you provide the picture, because it increases both the security and the memorability of the password. You get to decide the content of the picture and the portions that are important to you. Plus, you get to see a picture that is important to you just like many people do on their phone lock screen.
At its core, the picture password feature is designed to highlight the parts of an image that are important to you, and it requires a set of gestures that allow you to accomplish this quickly and confidently. In order to determine the best set of gestures to use, we distributed a set of pictures to a set of study participants and asked them to highlight the parts of the image that were important to them. That’s it, no additional instructions. What we found were people doing three basic things: indicating location, connecting areas or highlighting paths, and enclosing areas. We mapped these ideas to tap, line, and circle, respectively. It’s the minimal set of gestures we found that allowed people to signify the parts of the image most important to them.
There’s also an attribute inherent to circle and line gestures that adds an additional layer of personalization and security: directionality. When you draw either a circle or a line on your selected picture, Windows remembers how you drew it. So, someone trying to reproduce your picture password needs to not only know the parts of the image you highlighted and the order you did it in, but also the direction and start and end points of the circles and lines that you drew.
We also researched using freeform gestures. When we explored the concept, both with design iterations and research, we found the major pitfall of such a system: the time it takes to sign in. As I mentioned above, we wanted a solution that was faster than a touch keyboard. Throughout the evolutionary process of this feature we used the time taken to sign in using a touch keyboard as a benchmark to judge the success of our methods. We found that when people were allowed to use freeform gestures, it took them consistently longer to sign in. They were slowed down by the concept, feeling that they needed to be unnecessarily precise and trace fine details in an image.
Because people were highlighting areas instead of fine detail, we found that using a limited set of gestures was on average more than three times as fast as the freeform method. We also found that with repeated use, people using the gesture set were consistently able to complete the task in under four seconds, compared to an average of 17 seconds for the freeform model. After continued use of the freeform method, we found many participants asked to change their freeform gestures, picking simple lines and locations instead.
How it works
Once you have selected an image, we divide the image into a grid. The longest dimension of the image is divided into 100 segments. The shorter dimension is then divided on that scale to create the grid upon which you draw gestures.
To set up your picture password, you then place your gestures on the field we create. Individual points are defined by their coordinate (x,y) position on the grid. For the line, we record the starting and ending coordinates, as well as the order in which they occur. We use the ordering information to determine the direction the line was drawn in. For the circle, we record a center point coordinate, the radius of the circle, and its directionality. For the tap, we record the coordinate of the touch point.
When you attempt to sign in with Picture Password we evaluate the gestures you provide, and compare the set to the gestures you used when you set up your picture password. We take a look at the difference between each gesture and decide whether to authenticate you based on the amount of error in the set. If a gesture type is wrong—it should be a circle, but instead it’s a line—authentication will always fail. When the types, ordering, and directionality are all correct, we take a look at how far off each gesture was from the ones we’ve seen before, and decide if it’s close enough to authenticate you.
As an example, let’s take a look at the tap gesture. The tap is the least complex of the three gestures both in number of unique permutations and in the subsequent analysis. When considering whether the spot that you’ve tapped matches a reference spot, our scoring function compares the distance between the gesture you recorded as part of your picture password and the one that you just performed. The score decreases from 100% for a perfect match to 0% when sufficiently far away. Points match when the score is >= 90%. Here is a visual representation of the scoring function for a point in the immediate vicinity of a 100% match:
The area that is scored a match is a circle of radius 3. For any specific tap, a total of 37 (X,Y) locations will return a match. We perform similar calculations for the variables associated with lines and circles.
Security and gesture count
When we took a look at the number of gestures that would be required to use picture password we considered security, memorability, and speed. We sought to balance these often competing attributes to achieve an optimal user experience that would also be secure to use. In order to determine the appropriate gesture count that would meet our security goals, we compared picture password with different authentication methods, namely PIN and plain text password.
The analysis of the number of unique PINs is trivial. A 4-digit PIN (4 digits with 10 independent possibilities each) means there are 10[SUP]4[/SUP] = 10,000 unique combinations.
When looking at alphanumeric passwords, the analysis can be simplified by assuming passwords are a sequence of characters comprised of lower case letters (26), upper case letters (26), digits (10), and symbols (10). In the most basic case, when a password is comprised strictly of n lower case letters, there are 26[SUP]n[/SUP] permutations. When the password can be any length from 1 to n letters, then there are this many permutations:
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Signing in with a picture password - Building Windows 8 - Site Home - MSDN Blogs