As security expert Bruce Schneier said recently, password masking is not a panacea. Finding a solution that provides both security and usability is the goal.

HashMask is a jQuery plugin that will produce a unique and non reversible visualization of a users password. The hope being that they would be able to confirm that they entered their password correctly, but no one else would. It also degrades gracefully so that users without javascript or a poor browser (IE6) will just see a password field.

Technically speaking, it uses a subset of the sha1 hash of the password as the seed for the sparkline’s shape and color. It should be relatively safe from reverse engineering as a result. There is the potential to estimate a possible range of characters of the first section of the hash, but overall this should be a extremely low risk.

Requirements: Javascript Enabled
Demo: http://lab.arc90.com/2009/07/hashmask.php
License: BSD License