Abstract
Shoulder-surfing is a known risk where an attacker can capture a password by direct observation or by recording the authentication session. Due to the visual interface, this problem has become exacerbated in graphical passwords. There have been some graphical schemes resistant or immune to shoulder-surfing, but they have significant usability drawbacks, usually in the time and effort to log in. In this paper, we propose and evaluate a new shoulder-surfing resistant scheme which has a desirable usability for PDAs. Our inspiration comes from the drawing input method in DAS and the association mnemonics in Story for sequence retrieval. The new scheme requires users to draw a curve across their password images orderly rather than click directly on them. The drawing input trick along with the complementary measures, such as erasing the drawing trace, displaying degraded images, and starting and ending with randomly designated images provide a good resistance to shouldersurfing. A preliminary user study showed that users were able to enter their passwords accurately and to remember them over time.
Highlights
Graphical passwords have been proposed as a useful authentication method for Personal Digital Assistants (PDAs) which are increasingly used with their small size, compact deployment and low cost [1]
Given the fact that pictures are generally easier to remember than words [2, 3] and that humans are the ‘weakest link’ in any password authentication mechanism [4,5,6], it is conceivable that graphical passwords would be able to provide a good tradeoff between usability and security
Most of the current graphical password schemes are vulnerable to shoulder-surfing [7,8,9,10], a known risk where an attacker can capture a password by direct observation or by recording the authentication session
Summary
Abstract—Shoulder-surfing is a known risk where an attacker can capture a password by direct observation or by recording the authentication session. Due to the visual interface, this problem has become exacerbated in graphical passwords. There have been some graphical schemes resistant or immune to shoulder-surfing, but they have significant usability drawbacks, usually in the time and effort to log in. We propose and evaluate a new shoulder-surfing resistant scheme which has a desirable usability for PDAs. Our inspiration comes from the drawing input method in DAS and the association mnemonics in Story for sequence retrieval. The new scheme requires users to draw a curve across their password images orderly rather than click directly on them. A preliminary user study showed that users were able to enter their passwords accurately and to remember them over time
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