Hunt and Peck Security

Here's a novel idea: stop masking passwords on your login forms. You may think that is controversial and this will lead to the impending doom of the Internet. Not so much if you ask me.

For one, triggering a little paranoia and forcing users to look over their shoulders before typing in the passwords is a good thing. Any alert co-worker or coffee-shop-patron can pickup up the 5 letter name of a favorite pet as the keyboard is pecked. If users saw their simple password on the screen, they would be more inclined to pick a better one. Also, once these common world people start realizing that passwords are not the end-all to cyber security, they may start paying attention and switch to a single-sign on solution that can handle security better using thick-client technologies, or at least multi-factor authentication.

So how do you go about switching this paradigm? The first step is to provide the user with the option to mask the password with a little checkbox under your password input field. By default, you show the password in the clear but allow the user to check a box to mask it. Perhaps then we can start avoiding these types of articles from Wired.