[Cryptography] Of writing down passwords

[John Gilmore]

> > The security you get with writing passwords down is inherently 
> > because it's physically written and kept in a physical location, not 
> > on some electronic medium that could be cracked.
> 
> Beware of cameras! Their resolution now is so good that an attacker 
> without physical access can steal all your passwords using the 
> reflection in your eyes.

Can you post a demo of that?

Many of us have seen the Blade Runner movie scene where a photo is
magnified to show who took it via a captured reflection.  But whenever
I've tried something similar, the pixels are just too big and they
fuzz out.  I wasn't aware that e.g. laptop/phone cameras had good
enough optics and resolution to use reflections from eyes or
eyeglasses to read handwriting that's out of view of the camera.

It should be possible to improve the resolution by integrating
multiple successive photos (the way human eyes do), but the typical
way to get multiple images in tiny cameras is to ask them to send
video, and then you also have to deal with coding artifacts of highly
compressed video frames.

	John

PS: EFF offers the "Laptop Camera Cover Set", small privacy stickers
to cover the little cameras on your gadgets.  They are designed with
post-it like glue so that they can be removed without residue when you
want to use the camera, and re-stuck to block it during other times.
These also come as part of the "EFF Sticker Pack".  See:
https://supporters.eff.org/shop