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Comment by peterwwillis | Hacker News Reader

This is basically the same method I use for laptop hard disk encryption. I don't remember the password, but I typed it so many times my fingers remember exactly the pattern to type. Kind of like playing a piano.

Several times i've been drinking and am unable to remember how to log into my machine, because I can't replicate the pattern and don't remember the password. After 15 minutes of concentration it comes back.

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I found I couldn't enter my password in unusual situations, e.g. holding the keyboard in one hand, typing with the other. I finally cottoned on that my fingers' muscle memory was typing the password consistently but it wasn't what I thought it was; it had been corrupted by similar N-grams in Unix commands from the moment I'd first entered it twice to passwd(1).

I don't even need to be drinking, but sometimes I'll fat finger it a few times and get frustrated. The only way I can get logged in is to type really really fast.

Yeah, I find speed is important too. The quicker you can type it, the easier it is to recall. Another thing, if I slow down I notice i'm sort of humming parts of the pattern in my head, as if each character held a sort of audible weight that indicates where my fingers should go next... again, kind of like playing an instrument. Yet I can't play anything. Weird.

Sounds like that could be a sort of synaesthesia:

http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Synaesthesia

I've been wondering for a while where the boundary for being diagnosed with synaesthesia is - nearly everyone I know has some sort of synaesthesia, even if it's only associating numbers with colors. Yet, it's no where near the viewing-numbers-as-landscapes of Daniel Tammet's Born on a Blue Day or Nabokov's gift with words.

I suspect almost everyone has a little synaesthesia, just like almost everyone has a little depression, a little anxiety, a little Borderline Personality, a little schizophrenia...

I guess it's only worth giving your mental quirks a name if, say, they're 2σ above norm. I dunno, ask your doctor (or statistician :P).

No, it's not. Your laptop doesn't know your password and hence you can actually use it to generate and encryption key. This system needs the laptop to know your password.

It is of course a much more refined approach; critically, there never is a stage at which you retain explicit knowledge of the password. With pseudo-implicit passwords (knowing how to type but not quite remembering what), recall is still possible -- either via explicit recall after sufficient deliberation, or via presentation of the input device.

(Neat trick, but reversible password encryption still seems like a massive flaw here...)

When entering a password on my phone, I have to type it on my PC and then read it out. Even if I can say the password, things like case-sensitivity become an issue.

Same here with my ATM PIN - I could probably make a guess and tell you what the numbers are but not the order without actually using an ATM pad.

A few weeks ago it was late, I'd just come from the gym and not eaten anything and I couldn't figure out why my PIN wasn't working. Turned out I was trying to use a code that I stopped using a couple years ago.

I find that in this case, conscious concentration can actually make performance of the password sequence more difficult for me.

Also, I get into a stateful kind of memory where if I have to produce a password I normally produce at home while I'm at work, I produce the wrong password.

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