headers
Felix E. Klee | 15 Nov 2010 14:00
Picon
Gravatar

Font for hiding passwords

I am looking for a font that I can use for hiding passwords in text
documents, in particular with the EMACS text editor. And, yes, the
passwords should be copyable!

The font, naturally, should only consist of identical characters. Seems
like the Open Font Library has nothing to offer in that respect - or am
I missing something? I am grateful for any suggestion!

What I have found on the Web so far was dissatisfying:

* Password.ttf [1]:

  At least in EMACS, the distance between characters is smaller than
  their width, and the display of the text in this font is corrupted.

* Another Password.ttf [2]:

  Every character is a circle, except for the space. I don't like this
  exception since spaces may also be part of passwords.

* PasswordEntry.ttf [3]:

  Does not load in EMACS. Also, the spaces between characters is a bit
  too wide for my liking, but that's a cosmetic issue, not so important.

- Felix

[1] http://code.dev-tricks.net/password.ttf

[2] http://collab.directorforum.com/images/b/bd/Password.zip
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 10 comments |
headers
Khaled Hosny | 15 Nov 2010 14:46
Gravatar

Re: Font for hiding passwords

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 02:00:47PM +0100, Felix E. Klee wrote:
> I am looking for a font that I can use for hiding passwords in text
> documents, in particular with the EMACS text editor. And, yes, the
> passwords should be copyable!
> 
> The font, naturally, should only consist of identical characters. Seems
> like the Open Font Library has nothing to offer in that respect - or am
> I missing something? I am grateful for any suggestion!

It should be easy to create your own font, fire up FontForge, draw the
glyph you want (be it a circle or something else) Ctrl+C it (if you want
to reduce the size of the resulting font, use Ctrl+G instead), select or
other characters, Ctrl+V. Edit the font names (Ctrl+Shift+F), generate
it (Ctrl+Shift+G) and you are done.

Regards,
 Khaled

--

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer
Permalink | Reply | 6 comments |
headers
Felix E. Klee | 15 Nov 2010 15:01
Picon
Gravatar

Re: Font for hiding passwords

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny@...> wrote:
> It should be easy to create your own font, fire up FontForge,

Have never used, but if it's simple to install and use, and if I find
the time, why not?

> Ctrl+V.

Do I have to do that for every individual character? There are *many*
Unicode characters...

--

-- 
Dipl.-Phys. Felix E. Klee
Mobile: +34.693759173, +49.174.1386060
Fax: +49.3212.1021049
Permalink | Reply | 5 comments |
headers
Peter Baker | 15 Nov 2010 16:19
Picon

Re: Font for hiding passwords

If you know a little Python you can write a short script that will do
it for you.

Peter

On Monday, November 15, 2010, Felix E. Klee <felix.klee@...> wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny@...> wrote:
>> It should be easy to create your own font, fire up FontForge,
>
> Have never used, but if it's simple to install and use, and if I find
> the time, why not?
>
>> Ctrl+V.
>
> Do I have to do that for every individual character? There are *many*
> Unicode characters...
>
> --
> Dipl.-Phys. Felix E. Klee
> Mobile: +34.693759173, +49.174.1386060
> Fax: +49.3212.1021049
>
Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
Khaled Hosny | 15 Nov 2010 16:50
Gravatar

Re: Font for hiding passwords

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 03:01:14PM +0100, Felix E. Klee wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny@...> wrote:
> > It should be easy to create your own font, fire up FontForge,
> 
> Have never used, but if it's simple to install and use, and if I find
> the time, why not?
> 
> > Ctrl+V.
> 
> Do I have to do that for every individual character? There are *many*
> Unicode characters...

No, you can select them all once (you can even select the glyph you
copied, and invert selection to select every thing else in the font).
Also, by FontForge defaults to a small Unicode subset, so you have to go
to encoding menu and re-encode to Unicode (Unicode-BMP should do).

Regards,
 Khaled

--

-- 
 Khaled Hosny
 Arabic localiser and member of Arabeyes.org team
 Free font developer
Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
Liam R E Quin | 15 Nov 2010 17:11
Favicon
Gravatar

Re: Font for hiding passwords

On Mon, 2010-11-15 at 15:01 +0100, Felix E. Klee wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 2:46 PM, Khaled Hosny <khaledhosny@...> wrote:
> > It should be easy to create your own font, fire up FontForge,
[...]
> 
> Do I have to do that for every individual character? There are *many*
> Unicode characters...

You could also make it a fixed-width font and have an "unknown glyph"
glyph, perhaps.  Note that not all programs will render a space glyph,
but will just consider it as a motion.

Remember that other people could always paste the text into the emacs
mini-buffer and see it in the clear... it's usually also better not
to store passwords at all, but to store a one-way hash, so that you
can never provide someone's password e.g. to a police request, and
people can't break in and steal them. But that's a topic for a different
mailing list I expect.

Liam

--

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
Permalink | Reply | 2 comments |
headers
Felix E. Klee | 15 Nov 2010 18:17
Picon
Gravatar

Re: Font for hiding passwords

On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 5:11 PM, Liam R E Quin <liam@...> wrote:
> You could also make it a fixed-width font and have an "unknown glyph"
> glyph, perhaps. Note that not all programs will render a space glyph,
> but will just consider it as a motion.

Interesting. Indeed I thought that a font without any character may be
sufficient. I think EMACS would display rectangles instead.

By the way, if there is a way to create a simple font for my purposes,
without the use of heavy-weight tools like FontForge, I'd be happy to
hear about that! Perhaps it's even possible to directly write the source
code of a Type-1 font and then use the tool "t1asm" [1] to create it.

> Remember that other people could always paste the text into the emacs
> mini-buffer and see it in the clear...

I am the only person with access to that EMACS - or so it should be. And
the file in question is encrypted.

> it's usually also better not to store passwords at all, but to store a
> one-way hash, so that you can never provide someone's password e.g. to
> a police request,

Storing a one-way hash wouldn't make sense in that case. It's a list of
my passwords, though not all of them: For legal and security reasons,
some are only stored in my brain.

- Felix

[1] http://www.lcdf.org/~eddietwo/type/#t1utils
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 1 comment |
headers
Liam R E Quin | 15 Nov 2010 20:08
Favicon
Gravatar

Re: Font for hiding passwords

On Mon, 2010-11-15 at 18:17 +0100, Felix E. Klee wrote:
> On Mon, Nov 15, 2010 at 5:11 PM, Liam R E Quin <liam@...> wrote:
> > You could also make it a fixed-width font and have an "unknown glyph"
> > glyph, perhaps. Note that not all programs will render a space glyph,
> > but will just consider it as a motion.
> 
> Interesting. Indeed I thought that a font without any character may be
> sufficient. I think EMACS would display rectangles instead.

For a Type 1 font you need at least one glyph besides ".notdef", as I
recall (it's been a long time since I worked with Type 1 fonts at that
level!). Actually with Type 1, you could just make a custom encoding
that pointed everything at the same glyph.  Make sure it's monospaced -
e.g. start with Courier, and then you can use the same metrics.

And yes, you can use t1asm or pfatopfb etc, and friends.

> I am the only person with access to that EMACS - or so it should be. And
> the file in question is encrypted.

OK.

Liam

--

-- 
Liam Quin - XML Activity Lead, W3C, http://www.w3.org/People/Quin/
Pictures from old books: http://fromoldbooks.org/
Ankh: irc.sorcery.net irc.gnome.org www.advogato.org
(Continue reading)

Permalink | Reply | 0 comments |
headers
Felix E. Klee | 19 Nov 2010 11:39
Picon
Gravatar

Re: Font for hiding passwords

Thanks for all suggestions! I have now created a font:

  http://openfontlibrary.org/files/feklee/331

However, I had issues with encoding. I created a TrueType font with all
Unicode BMP characters, except U+FFFD, U+FFFE, U+FFFF (to get below the
sfnt size limitation). This worked, but I could not upload the ca. 1MB
ZIP file to the Open Font Library. Got a PHP error message. The unzipped
sfd file was about ten Megabytes, even though all non-default glyphs
were references to the default one.

At least on Windows XP, the encoding is not much of an issue for this
font since the default glyph is used for any missing glyphs. However, as
can be seen when visiting the above URL, it's a problem on the web.

How would I select a character set in FontForge that is not as big as
Unicode BMP, but that is sufficient for most purposes?

Interesting, I assume, would be the WGL4 character set:

  http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/WGL-4

But I don't see a way to select it in FontForge, or how to somehow
import it.
Permalink | Reply | 2 comments |
headers
Dave Crossland | 19 Nov 2010 14:38
Gravatar

Re: Font for hiding passwords

On 19 November 2010 17:39, Felix E. Klee <felix.klee@...> wrote:
> Thanks for all suggestions! I have now created a font:

How did you do it? :0
Permalink | Reply | 1 comment |

Gmane