Online security measures might start incorporating a kind of Rorschach test:
The new approach is straightforward and relies on a user answering a number of questions when he or she first signs up for access to a website. It begins by generating a set of simple inkblot pictures by randomly positioning different coloured ink spots in a small area of the screen. As part of the signup process, the user is asked to write a short phrase that describes each of these pictures. When the users return to access the site with a password, they are also shown the inkblot patterns and the set phrases that describe them. Their task is then to allocate the correct phrase to each pattern. [Jeremiah Blocki and others at Carnegie Mellon University] call their new test a GOTCHA (Generating panOptic Turing Tests to Tell Computers and Humans Apart).
Meghan Neal thinks through the ramifications:
Inkblots are a popular with password gurus for a couple reasons. One, visual images are generally easier for people to remember than numbers. Two, recognizing patterns and associating them with intuited phrases is something machines aren’t able to do—not yet, at least. The human mind, on the other hand, “can easily imagine semantically meaningful objects in each image,” the study states.
Thus, hackers would need to be able to think like a human to crack the code, and would be forced to use actual humans to wage an attack. At the least, it would make password cracking much more cumbersome and expensive, researchers suggest.
The downside to Rorschach-style puzzles is that there’s no guaranteeing you’re going to interpreted a pattern the same way twice.
The Dish 