Comment by yencabulator
2 years ago
I've seen a GUI password input field that mutated an abstract line drawing on every keypress. Think random cross-hatching over the whole input field where the lines are nudged a little on every press.
(Not that that's necessarily a good idea, it still gives away timing/length information to e.g. cameras.)
I remember seeing this in Lotus Notes. Never saw it before that, or since.
Oh yes, that could be it! Employer made me run Windows in a VM to read corporate email.
My memory doesn't match videos I can find online of it, but that could be version differences.
At IBM someone made something called fetchnotes that worked like fetchmail, but worked with mail and calendar, made me able to get away with minimal usage of notes.
Yes. Wasn't it to make it harder spoof a password prompt with a static image popping up?
I think it was to provide an indication that the password was correct at a glance. (IIRC the number of dots in the password field was also generated, so it didn't necessarily match the number of chars)
The image was essentially a simple checksum. Each user would eventually memorise which icon was "theirs".
xsecurelock[https://github.com/google/xsecurelock] has a few variants on this.