Passnumbers: An Approach of Graphical Password Authentication Based on Grid Selection

Abstract

The authentication textual passwords are the most widely used technique. However, this type of legacy authentication is vulnerable to various attacks, such as shoulder-surfing attacks. Hence, graphical password authentication is one of these approaches which has been suggested to overcome the issues related to textual passwords. Nevertheless, the hackers have also developed new techniques that can be finally broken the graphical password, for instance, listening to the transmitted information between the client and the server. In this paper, Passnumbers graphical authentication password is proposed. Passnumbers approach involves two new stages, which are first, using the coordinates of a graphical grid cells-based numbers for entering the password. The second stage is represented by deploying a new technique to encrypt the password based on the image pixels. The performance evaluation reveals that the proposed Passnumbers can provide high resistance against several graphical password attacks including shoulder surfing and eavesdropping attacks. Passnumbers is evaluated using several metrics including security and usability.