TMGMap: Designing Touch Movement-Based Geographical Password Authentication on Smartphones

Abstract

Although textual passwords are the most widely adopted authentication method, they are vulnerable to many known limitations. Graphical password is considered as one alternative to complement the existing authentication systems, based on the observation that humans can remember images better than textual information. In order to obtain a large password space, geographical passwords have received much attention, which enable users to select one or more places on a map for authentication. For example, PassMap requires users to choose two places on a world map as their credentials, and GeoPass enables users to click only one place for authentication. However, we identify that users are able to perform more particular gestures like touch movement on mobile devices as compared to a common computer. Motivated by the observation, in this work, we develop TMGMap, a touch movement-based geographical password scheme on smartphones, which allows users to draw their secrets on a world map via touch movement events. We conducted a user study with a total of 60 participants, and found that users could achieve better results with our scheme in the aspects of both security and usability, as compared to similar schemes.