Hash Visualization : a New Techniqueto improve Real - World

Current security systems suuer from the fact that they fail to account for human factors. This paper considers two human limitations: First, people are slow and unreliable when comparing meaningless strings; and second , people have diiculties in remembering strong passwords or PINs. We identify two applications where these human factors negatively aaect security: Validation of root keys in public-key infrastructures, and user authen-tication. Our approach to improve the security of these systems is to use hash visualization, a technique which replaces meaningless strings with structured images. We examine the requirements of such a system and propose the prototypical solution Random Art. We also show how to apply hash visualization to improve the real-world security of root key validation and user authentication.