Chroma-Hash

A sexy, secure visualization of password field input

In a tweet: Chroma-Hash is a jQuery plugin that dynamically visualizes secure text-field values using ambient color bars

Password entry can be frustrating, especially with long or difficult passwords. On a webpage, secure fields obscure your input with •'s, so others can't read it. Unfortunately, neither can you—you can't tell if you got your password right until you click "Log In".

Chroma-Hash displays a series of colored bars at the end of field inputs so you can instantly see if your password is right. Chroma-Hash takes an MD5 hash of your input and uses that to compute the colors in the visualization. The resulting color pattern is non-reversible, so no one could know what your password just from the colors.

For a more detailed description of Chroma-Hash, be sure to check out this blog post about it..

The Dojo version can be found at http://github.com/waynebaylor/dojo-Chroma-Hash

Demo

Actions speak louder than words.
Try it out at: http://mattt.github.com/Chroma-Hash/

Usage

dojo.query("input[type=password]").forEach(function(input) {
  chromaHash(input, {
    bars: 3, 
    salt:"7be82b35cb0199120eea35a4507c9acf", 
    minimum:6
  });
});

• bars number of bars displayed (1,2,3, or 4)
• salt value to be appended when calculating hash function
• minimum minimum number of characters needed for grayscale bars to be displayed in color

Requirements

• Dojo 1.4 (uses dojo.position)

License

Chroma-Hash is licensed under the MIT License:

Copyright (c) 2009 Mattt Thompson (http://mattt.me/)

Permission is hereby granted, free of charge, to any person obtaining a copy of this software and associated documentation files (the "Software"), to deal in the Software without restriction, including without limitation the rights to use, copy, modify, merge, publish, distribute, sublicense, and/or sell copies of the Software, and to permit persons to whom the Software is furnished to do so, subject to the following conditions:

The above copyright notice and this permission notice shall be included in all copies or substantial portions of the Software.

THE SOFTWARE IS PROVIDED "AS IS", WITHOUT WARRANTY OF ANY KIND, EXPRESS OR IMPLIED, INCLUDING BUT NOT LIMITED TO THE WARRANTIES OF MERCHANTABILITY, FITNESS FOR A PARTICULAR PURPOSE AND NONINFRINGEMENT. IN NO EVENT SHALL THE AUTHORS OR COPYRIGHT HOLDERS BE LIABLE FOR ANY CLAIM, DAMAGES OR OTHER LIABILITY, WHETHER IN AN ACTION OF CONTRACT, TORT OR OTHERWISE, ARISING FROM, OUT OF OR IN CONNECTION WITH THE SOFTWARE OR THE USE OR OTHER DEALINGS IN THE SOFTWARE.

Credit

Inspired by Arc90 Lab's HashMask, by Chris Dary http://lab.arc90.com/2009/07/hashmask.php

Chroma-Hash uses Paul Johnston's Javascript MD5 implementation, and is distributed under the BSD License
See http://pajhome.org.uk/crypt/md5 for more info

Includes jQuery Color Animations plugin, Copyright 2007 John Resig Released under the MIT and GPL licenses
See http://plugins.jquery.com/project/color for jQuery project page

Thanks to Ian Young for his suggestion to represent color components in 4-bits to increase overall security.