[messaging] Social Security cards and additional issues

[Robert Ransom]

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