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There is significant but often unmeasured expenditure in the generation of unique codes or passwords and the human error associated with their use, in addition to the inherent security risks of transmission. An innovative and inexpensive component from Sandford Technology - the Human Readable Code Generator - enables the automatic generation of unambiguous and unique human-readable codes for use in various applications such as the creation of a large number of unique user passwords or software activation keys.

Potential applications include:

• Creating unique passwords for use by database, help-desk personnel etc
• Creating serial numbers or software activation keys from sources such as user name, company, machine data and other information
• Encoding/decoding binary data for consumption by humans, by fax etc
• Encoding/decoding binary data for easy transmission over text based protocols like HTML, SMTP
• Secure transmission of passwords over insecure communication link

What is Human Readable Code?

Most encoding mechanisms, which convert binary data to text data, make full use of the ASCII character set. This results in encoding data containing a mix of upper and lower case letters, numbers and punctuation. Such encoding can be difficult to read depending on what font is used and very difficult to say over the phone. Human Readable Codes consist of a simple alphanumeric character set that is very easy to read (e.g. on a fax) and very easy to say down the phone.

Passwords and serial numbers:

A password is a secret series of characters normally used to gain access to computers, networks or online services. The Human Readable Code component can help generate easy to use secure passwords.

A Serial Number is a unique code that is cryptographically related to some input data. The input data is usually information such as name, e-mail address etc. Serial Numbers are often used to unlock shareware or identify computers. The Serial Number is always unique for any unique input data and cannot be reversed. It is virtually impossible to derive the input data from the Serial Number.

There are many different systems and protocols that are only able to transmit and receive 7-bit data, for example HTTP headers (web traffic) and SMTP (email traffic). The restriction of sending 7-bit data works fine if the only traffic is plain text but users often wish to transmit 8-bit files such as picture etc. Such files require all 8-bits of data to be transmitted correctly.

Historically various encoding mechanisms have been developed to turn 8-bit data into 7-bit data. Some of the most popular encoding mechanisms include Base64, Bin Hex 4.0, UUencode, and Quoted-Printable. All of these mechanisms are very effective with Base64 being the most popular. The issue with using these mechanisms is the resulting 7-bit data is ideal for a computer but can be unreadable for a human being. The Human Readable encoding is designed to make binary data consumable for human beings, using a limited character set with the ambiguous characters removed.

The Human Readable encoding is only a few characters larger than the other encoding mechanisms. However, it is much less likely to be misread on a fax or other document and can easily be conveyed verbally to a user.