I think it's cute," says Kenneth Weiss, who now runs a three-factor authentication business called Universal Secure Registry. "I don't think it's serious security."

The major downside of the picture password is that drawing a finger across a photo on a touch screen is easy to video record from a distance - making it relatively easy to compromise, he says. Designers of alpha-numeric passwords recognize this danger and have responded to it by having password characters appear as dots on the screen so the password can't be copied down.