View article

High-entropy codewords frequently occur in the context of cryptographic protocols, and typically range in length from 128 to 1024 bits. Human vision is not well equipped to compare or recognise such codewords, due to the high information (length) and entropy content. In this paper, we propose a human visualisation mechanism to enable representation of long high-entropy codewords via perceptually significant visual images. The main contribution is a mechanism capable of representation at more detailed scales of resolution in progressive steps, so as to allow human visual inspection which is both secure and ergonomic. The generation of these visual representations is either dependent on key-specific or context-sensitive system inputs. The featured representation allows for machine-to-human authentication and authorization.