Getting your World of Warcraft account stolen is pretty awful.

Someone plants a keylogger on your computer and susses out your password. Sure, you’re going to get all your in-game stuff stolen, that’s a given. Next time you log in, your character is going to be standing around in his skivvies.

But say your character has access to a guild bank. Well, then you just let some guy loot the fruits of countless hours of labor of all your friends. Things get uncomfortable.

Apparently that’s why Blizzard is rolling out the Blizzard Authenticator, a hardware dongle that fits on your keychain. Once it goes on sale, you can buy one for $6.50.

The authenticator appears to be a fancy name for a one-time pad system. Whenever you log in, you press a button on the dongle and it gives you a six-character password that you enter into the WoW client.

A one-time pad is, in theory, absolutely perfect security as long as the password is truly random. What’s more important, however, is keeping new passwords constantly coming in so those pesky keyloggers won’t help thieves break into someone’s account.

Still, it’s not impenetrable. If people will give their passwords away to people pretending to be Blizzard representatives, and they do, they’ll give their one-time keys to the same people if asked. The human element trumps technology every time.

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