WASHINGTON: Researchers, including those of Indian-origin, have proposed a variety of innovative methods that can add a strong second layer of security to your password, protecting it from hackers.

Researchers from the University of Alabama at Birmingham, along with the University of California at Irvine, offered new options to increase password security against hacking.

"There have been many attacks on servers that store passwords lately, such as the breaches at PayPal and LinkedIn," said Nitesh Saxena, associate professor in the Department of Computer and Information Sciences at UAB.

Many people use the same few uncomplicated passwords repeatedly, making them easy to remember. Passwords are typically stored on servers in a hashed form.

Hackers can garner passwords either by an online brute-force attack, or by hacking a server with poor security and using a 'dictionary' of passwords to test offline.

Two-factor authentication schemes, such as Google Authenticator, or hardware tokens, such as RSA SecureID, use a second device to generate a temporary personal identification number, or PIN, that the user must enter along with their password.

But current two-factor schemes present the same vulnerabilities to server hacks as password-only authentication, Saxena said.

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