> If you are going to bother with this, you will need to block the virtual
> keyboard, & (possibly) write your own, since you can't intercept its
> keystrokes until the user finishes with it, rendering the mask technique
> inoperable...
Let's start from the beginning? Was the goal to provide secure entry
of the data? Or was the goal to make it "difficult" for someone else to
social engineer the password from you as you entered it (shoulder-surfing)?
I'm leaning towards the original poster referencing the latter and not the
former.
My original comment about Symbol font vs. punctuation was simply to
dissuade those who may pick up my device and change the font to see my
password. Then again, for me, my device *NEVER* leaves my person, and even
if it did, everything is locked down hard in Strip and some other apps, that
the device is pretty much rendered useless anyway. I have other devices if
this one gets stolen. *shrug*
When I was at $LASTJOB, one my projects was to design a lab solution
using wireless web tablets (Fujitsu, Cruise Technologies; this was back in
1998/1999) bringing custom pharmeceutical applications over 802.11 using
Citrix Metaframe and biometric authentication to log into the tablet. At the
time, the "Finger Chip" was the hip device we were tinkering with. I'm
really surprised this hasn't caught on for cell phones and PDAs yet. It
would make it quite a bit easier to lock them down.
As many have seen from my posts in pilot-unix, the security on Palm
(as we all know) is security-by-obfuscation, not true security. As more and
more "business logic" data gets transferred onto, across, and with these
devices, the demand for "true" security will increase, as will the price
point and hardware required to support it.
Finger Chip can be found here, for the curious:
http://www.tcs.thomson-csf.com/fingerchip/FC_home.htm
Any hardware developers listening here on the forum want to talk
about developing an add-on? Steve?
/d
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