HyPA: A Hybrid Password-Based Authentication Mechanism

Abstract

User authentication is the process of verifying identity of a user. A user’s identity can be verified by using different types of authentication mechanisms such as text-based password, graphical password, and biometrics. Password-based authentication is the primary line of defense against intruders and cyberattacks. Text-based password is widely used for authentication purpose, but it is vulnerable to different kind of security attacks, such as brute force attack, dictionary attack, shoulder surfing attack etc. To overcome such risks, we propose a hybrid password authentication (HyPA) mechanism in this paper. In our proposed method we combine graphical password with text-based password. Using HyPA user needs to provide text-based password (alphanumerical character) along with image-based password. The analysis proves the efficiency, effectiveness, and security of HyPA. We also show that our proposed mechanism is secure against brute force attack, dictionary attack, and shoulder surfing attack.