| 
 Researchers at Microsoft Corp. are working on new types of passwords that will be easier for people to remember but harder for hackers to crack. 
  
The key -- images, which tend to make more of an impression on people than strings of text characters. 
Darko Kirovski, a cryptography and anti-piracy researcher at Microsoft, demonstrated a prototype password system at Microsoft offices in Mountain View, California, on Wednesday. 
On a screen full of images of different country flags, he clicked on a number of points within the images that correspond to specific pixels. The series of pixels is then converted into a random number and stored in the computer, he said. 
 
         |