No. Many people are suprised to discover the random card key pattern is simple a printed matrix of segments the same as any barcode. All the character visualization calculations are done by the server which creates the animated challenge picture the card sits in front of.

Its PassWindow's extremely low-tech approach which gives it such a low attack surface, leaving attackers with no hi-tech approaches they would normally employ against electronics.

No. The animated screen challenges are simply gif images, a universal web image format. This means that any ordinary browser on any device will display the challenges with no effort required by the user.

Interestingly the challenges can also be printed on paper such as documents so users can authenticate using a pencil and paper.

The PassWindow challenge pattern presented on the computer screen can easily be resized and moved around on the screen by the user. The size and position is then stored as a cookie in the user's web browser or alternatively on the system server for future reference, so you only ever have to do it once.

Why not try our demo to see the process for yourself?

No. The authentication script would simply record your preferred challenge image location and proportion and save this information to a cookie in your browser. If the service detects your cookies are disabled then alternatively the information can be recorded on the server as part of your user profile on their database.

This way, each time you need to authenticate in the future, the pattern is in the correct position for your card.

Yes, the animated challenge speed can be easily modified according to your preference by the server, in fact most implementations will detect the speed of your response and adjust the animation based on your authentication history.

No the costs for transparent cards should be exactly the same as regular white cards.

Most raw plastic from the factory begins in a transparent form to which the specific colour is added during the manufacturing process such as white.

A tint printed over the transparent PassWindow card region prevents PassWindow key patterns from being easily photocopied or photographed, and renders the pattern very difficult to see under normal conditions. Your physical proximity security should always be considered seriously no matter what security action you are performing and PassWindow is just as susceptible to physical attack as other methods in this regard.

PassWindow is designed to be used as an online second-factor authentication method. This means it should be used in conjunction with a memorized component, such as a username and password. Therefore, to authenticate, the user must provide 'something they know' – their username and password – along with 'something they have' – their PassWindow-embedded identification card. A random thief or lost card would not be recognizably associated with a victims username or password.

In fact this physical proximity security issue applies to all physical authentication devices and PassWindow is no different. Hardware tokens can be quickly replaced with replica dummies designed to capture a local pin number. Mobile phones have a large attack surface and are suceptible to both online, remote and physical proximity attacks. Biometric authentication can be spoofed.

The Card Verification Value (CVV) is a number that is typically printed on the back of a credit card, which must be input in conjunction with one's other credit card details when making 'card not present' purchases, such as when one makes an online transaction.

This number is generated cryptographically by the issuing bank using the details of the credit card; however, this number is only printed on the card, it is not stored on the card's magnetic stripe.

Card vendors use this code to ascertain whether the person conducting the transaction either has the card in their possession, or has at least seen the card, or communicated with someone who has seen the card.

While CVV provides some level of protection against online credit card fraud in that merchants are required to regularly delete CVV data, it only really protects against the broad scale theft of card data; for example, from a compromised database.

CVV is also susceptible to phishing scams.

While PassWindow might be considered to be similar to CVV, it is far more secure:

• The PassWindow key pattern cannot be easily read, remembered, photographed, or photocopied.
• The PassWindow key pattern cannot be verbally communicated or easily transmitted via computer.
• It is impossible for a phishing scam to generate a valid challenge pattern – alerting the user that the request is being made by a different entity.
• To authenticate with a PassWindow embedded card, the user must have the physical card in their immediate possession.
• The numbers that are revealed when the key and challenge patterns are combined is only used once. So, even if this code is intercepted, it cannot be used for future transactions.

The existence of malware with man-in-the-middle capabilities represents a significant threat to the security of the online community and is commonly used by hackers to obtain usernames, passwords, credit card details and enable fraudulent transaction authentication etc.

Mobile SMS and OTP hardware token authentication provides little protection against this threat.

PassWindow has the unique ability to encode specific transaction information directly into the visual challenge thereby preventing a man-in-the-middle attack, whats more this mutual authentication is done passively by the user who simply visually checks the information rather than long complicated manual processes employed by high end transaction signing tokens.

Existing authentication systems use a hardware token that contains sophisticated electronics that generate new authentication codes at given time intervals – usually around 30 seconds or a minute. The clocks on the server and the hardware token are synchronized, allowing the server to be reasonably sure that the person entering the code is in possession of the hardware token.

The PassWindow authentication method is superior to hardware token based methods for the following reasons:

• PassWindow is significantly less expensive to implement and manage.
• PassWindow contains no electronics, so it never runs out of batteries or experiences clock synchronization problems.
• Unlike the codes generated by SecurID, the PassWindow key pattern cannot be easily communicated, which means it's more secure against social-engineering-based attacks such as telephone callers pretending to be a targets local bank.
• PassWindow is more secure against Man-In-The-Middle (MITM) attacks which modern malware is capable of.
• You can easily distribute PassWindow-embedded cards through your existing card distribution infrastructure.
• Unlike hardware tokens, PassWindow-embedded cards introduce no additional support costs.

No, from the very beginning we have analyzed this threat ourselves and found the results are very predicatable and not practical for an attack even under the ideal circumstance for an attacker.

Primarily our server analyzes the key and challenge interactions ourselves and introduces enough entropy to ensure an attacker will never gain enough information to determine the key pattern over the life of the card.

We assume this analysis is being done right from the beginning and by simple pattern manipulation and authentication behaviour monitoring ensure the required interceptions are well beyond an attackers reach.

PassWindow's security is also augmented using various proprietary techniques that drastically increase the number of successful interception attempts required to make reasonable probabalistic statistical deductions at the key pattern.

Much of security strength is increased exponentially by configuring a larger key pattern for the user; our extensive testing and analysis has shown that even with relatively small key patterns of 9 or 12 columns if configured properly are well beyond trojan analysis in any meaningful timeframe.

To complete the picture, with the PassWindow Authentication Manager it is possible to schedule card renewal at particular time intervals or after the user has reached a certain number of authentications, rendering it impossible for a hacker to obtain enough interceptions to have any meaningful chance at guessing the key pattern.

PassWindow's advantage is that unlike electronics where security strength is hardcoded into the chips PassWindow challenges being a simple browser image are able to manipulate the overall security and usability even after the card has been deployed.

By monitoring a user's keystrokes malware could theoretically try to match the timing of these against the challenge frame shown and thereby speed up the necessary number of interceptions to try to deduce the users key. In reality this is a very unlikely attack as users are seldom as precise in their keystroke timing as they would need to be and a variety of unknown factors could warp the results such as challenge network loading times.

Part of the added security strength of the animated challenge method is to obfuscate the exact digits a user enters against which frame the user has read them from; there are two simple methods to prevent this type of potential malware analysis being done against a user.

• A basic defence is to make the password field hidden which requires the user to memorize the digits and only when they are ready and click a submit button does the password field become visible.
• The second method is to analyse this behaviour in the same way as the malware might. This would involve actively monitoring in the background the user's password keystrokes and their associated timing with simple and then on the server side deduce upon submission if the user really is pressing the password digits at the same time as the frames themselves are being shown. The authentication manager can then decide to actively increase the frame rate of the user's future authentication challenges or even provide a simple warning message to the user explaining their login behaviour is making their key less secure.

In practice this possibility can be easily prevented without any active interference to the user.

From our extensive analysis deduced by many independent international cryptographers and specialist mathematical pattern analysts there are a few simple rules for exponential key strength when choosing a PassWindow configuration.

• Key column width - Simply adding extra matrix column's to a key pattern exponentially increases the strength of the overall method. The increase in statistical difficulty from 15 to 18 columns is exponentially greater than the increase from 12 to 15.Of course there is nothing to stop you using a 50 column key pattern.
• Authentication digit to animation frame ratio - For a particular animated configuration there might be for example 10 overall single digit frames with a 6 digit authentication code request, counter intuitively a smaller 4 digit code is actually more difficult to analyze as the ratio between digits to frames will have increased. This effect is exponential as the increase from 6 to 4 digits in 10 frames is far greater than the difficulty increase from 8 to 6 digits in 10 frames. There is no cost to user convenience by simply adding more frames to the challenge patterns.
• Other simple configuration settings which can drastically increase the overall PassWindow security include, extra pattern rows, increasing obfuscation segment frequency, larger character set possibilities and modifications to the animated frames and general user method however these all come at a convenience cost for the end user.

A general suggestion from our own analysis for the smallest secure patterns would be 9 column key pattern for normal user authentication and 12 column key patterns for financial systems requiring individual transaction authentication.

At first glance the visual keys may appear simplistic which could lead you to question how many potiential unique keys there are available.

In simple language let's take the 12 column keys used in our demo, there are 62 available segments with 4,611,686,018,427,387,904 possible combinations. Approximately 30% of those are too light, dark or contain unwanted characters. This leaves us with such a huge number of potiential keys that we never need repeat the same key twice, ever.