A Survey on Graphical Authentication System Resisting Shoulder Surfing Attack

Abstract

In today’s modern world, security is a major concern. To provide security, the most widely recognized authentication methods are credentials, OTP, LTP, etc, and these methods are more prone to brute-force attack, shoulder surfing attack, and dictionary attack. Shoulder surfing attack (SSA) is a data theft approach used to obtain the personal identification numbers or passwords by looking over the user’s shoulder or by external recording devices and video-capturing devices. Since SSA occurs in a benevolent way, it goes unnoticed most of the time. It is one of the simple and easy methods for hackers to steal one’s sensitive information. The hacker has to simply peek in while the user types in the password without any much effort involved. Therefore, this phenomenon is widely unknown to people all over the world. Textual passwords are a ubiquitous part of digital age. Web applications/mobile applications demand a strong password with at least one capital letter and a special letter. People tend to give easy passwords in order to remember them which can be easily shoulder surfed. To overcome this, graphical password techniques are used to provide a more secure password. In the graphical authentication system, the users click on target images from a challenge set for authentication. Various graphical systems have been proposed over the years which are shown to be more secure when compared to other authentication systems. In this paper, an overview of various graphical authentication systems is presented.