The day might come when biometrics completely replaces the function served with passwords. But will it matter? The fact is, that that biometric reality grows closer every day. Right now, hardware becoming cheap and software environments becoming virtual, has many such realities racing at us like a wild mustang. But, I know you. You’re human, you need to see it in action. Well, do I have the perfect software for you. You or anyone can download for free something called Ophcrack. Ophcrack uses Rainbow Tables (and well). Take a look at it here, where Lifehacker has a gallery of screenshots of Ophcrack at work under Windows.

What does all that mean? I’ll keep it simple. Ophcrack can crack the password “Fgpyyih804423″ in 160 seconds (or for more here for Thomas Ptacek’s work on the subject or here where Darknet talks about its history). Anyone with Computer or Network Security experience (or that has tried to guess a password) will tell you, thats expected to be a difficult password to crack, and being cracked in 160 seconds is jaw dropping. “Fgpyyih804423″ is not very human relative and by that I mean its not a word in any language, nor a composite of any word in any language ( its not even some tokenized expression). In fact, the string of characters looks to be (because it is) quite random.

Worried yet? If not, some forward thinking might get you bit concerned. Implementations of biometrics really don’t solve this issue (they’re conceptually the same). They just make the string’s identity larger and thereby, by today’s standards, more difficult to crack. But, as technology grows to facilitate biometrics, so will that which is used to subvert biometrics and in not so different ways than we see here. So, my question to you is, what will you do, when you can’t trust your own reflection?