Among the goals of Mozilla for the future is to improve privacy and security with a set of extensions to the browser: the first is called Visual Hashing and uses color to help identify the password, highlight, and if you use too much often the same old combination of access.

How do you see a blog post by Mozilla Labs , the management of user passwords for various web services still leaves much to be desired and there is room for improvement. With this in mind that Mozilla has launched the "Watchdog Project", a series of complementary experiments to Browser ID , to help users control their identity and security of their data on the Internet.

The Watchdog project, or "watchdog", aims to encourage the 'adoption of Good passwords and less prone to risks. A first step in this direction is the extension Visual Hashing created by Paul Sawaya , developer and manager of the main watchdog.

The extension is available for Firefox to Google Chrome .

Once installed, Visual Hashing uses a palette, a variety of colors to identify the password typed. The colors, four values ​​are hash and are shown as background in the fields where you type your password when accessing sites and services like Twitter, Facebook, GMail, Flickr and so on.

Visual Hashing in action on Flickr

The purpose is twofold: first, the user receives visual feedback through which it can check that the password is actually the right one and not another. The more feedback, more immediate and useful, is related to security: if the color scheme is repeated a little 'too often means that you are always using the same password and it is probably the case that varies, making it a little' less easy to work with any attackers interested in our data.