Secure authentication

Abstract

Traditional authentication methods are vulnerable to different types of attacks. The authentication scheme like password or PIN-based have proven to be vulnerable to different forms of observation attacks such as, video-recording, key-logging or shoulder surfing attacks. In order to reduce these type of attacks, a number of solutions have been proposed. More used proposed system is the cognitive authentication scheme. This is a challenge-response protocol, or a question answering method that needs the users to do some form of cognitive functions or cognitive operations. By using the timing attack on the Hopper Blum method we can show that this authentication scheme is not secure against observation attack. And provide a pictorial or graphical authentication scheme with the help of the Hopper Blum method. Also propose more security enhancements of these schemes. The enhancements show the existence of a strong tradeoff between security and usability, indicating that the safety of cognitive authentication methods comes in a non-negligible usability cost. For this reason, the design of a new cognitive authentication method should not ignore possible threats induced by side-channel timing attacks.