[messaging] Social Security cards and additional issues

Robert Ransom rransom.8774 at gmail.com
Thu Jan 30 22:56:47 PST 2014


On 1/30/14, Trevor Perrin <trevp at trevp.net> wrote:
> On Thu, Jan 30, 2014 at 12:21 PM, Watson Ladd <watsonbladd at gmail.com>
> wrote:

>> I don't think this is coincidence: has human interaction research been
>> conducted on
>> making strings easily identifiable?
>
> There's research on character legibility and word recognition that's
> not hard to find (eg Miles Tinker, Kevin Larson).  But for
> alphanumeric strings of crypto length I couldn't find much.

<http://www.plosone.org/article/info%3Adoi%2F10.1371%2Fjournal.pone.0000680>
is an interesting article on how humans read strings.

The aspect of that research result most obviously relevant to
fingerprint usability is that if small differences between character
strings matter, we really, really want to turn off the user's
recognition of ‘wholes’ and ‘context’ when they compare two strings,
because those two recognition systems have really good
error-correction circuits.


Robert Ransom


More information about the Messaging mailing list