London, March 15 (IANS): Ever fancied a password that changes every minute? One may soon be available, with engineers developing a new password technique that uses visual patterns and resembles a Sudoku puzzle.

“The problem of passwords is that they are very weak, they are always getting hacked, and also, from a user point of view, they are too complicated, everybody has 20, 30, 60 passwords,” said Steven Hope, managing director of Winfrasoft.

Worse, they all have to be different, so “no one can remember them, so everybody writes them down or resets them every time they log in. They don't work in the real world today”, he added.

And as millions of Internet users have learned the hard way, no password is safe when hackers can net them en masse from banks, e-mail services, retailers or social media websites that fail to fully protect their servers.

In response to the vulnerabilities and hassles of the antiquated username - password formula, Winfrasoft has developed an alternative based on a four-colour grid with numbers inside that resembles a Sudoku puzzle.

Users select a pattern on the grid as their “password” and because the numbers inside the boxes change once per minute, the code changes too, making it far harder to hack.