There is also a nice concept of “Visual Hashes” that I have been meaning to do some work with.
Basically the idea is humans are good at pattern recognition, so instead of just displaying a SHA1 hash of hex numbers, you create a 100×100 bitmap of coloured patterns and lines. Then you just need to tell your users “The pattern should look like this”
I worry a little about how well “pattern recognition” is, though, for this stuff. Recognizing real objects (Now that’s a woman! That’s a house, that’s a fish, that’s a bee!!!) is what we’re wired to do, not recognizing abstract patterns. Maybe mapping hashes to images of things is better (but then again, if the order matters it becomes a jumble).
There’s also using facial recognition for matching patterns in cryptograhpy, but even then, some of us still can’t tell the difference.
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DDD | 29-Oct-06 at 2:20 am | Permalink
There is also a nice concept of “Visual Hashes” that I have been meaning to do some work with.
Basically the idea is humans are good at pattern recognition, so instead of just displaying a SHA1 hash of hex numbers, you create a 100×100 bitmap of coloured patterns and lines. Then you just need to tell your users “The pattern should look like this”
csm | 30-Oct-06 at 12:14 am | Permalink
I worry a little about how well “pattern recognition” is, though, for this stuff. Recognizing real objects (Now that’s a woman! That’s a house, that’s a fish, that’s a bee!!!) is what we’re wired to do, not recognizing abstract patterns. Maybe mapping hashes to images of things is better (but then again, if the order matters it becomes a jumble).
There’s also using facial recognition for matching patterns in cryptograhpy, but even then, some of us still can’t tell the difference.