Universal Multi-Factor Authentication Using Graphical Passwords

Abstract

In this paper, we present a series of methods to authenticate a user with a graphical password. To that end, we employ the user's personal handheld device as the password decoder and the second factor of authentication. In our methods, a service provider challenges the user with an image password. To determine the appropriate click points and their order, the user needs some hint information transmitted only to her handheld device. We show that our method can overcome threats such as key-loggers, weak password, and shoulder surfing. With the increasing popularity of handheld devices such as cell phones, our approach can be leveraged by many organizations without forcing the user to memorize different passwords or carrying around different tokens.

A Novel Soft Computing Authentication Scheme for Textual and Graphical Passwords

“…To overcome the issues with traditional password-based scheme [3], the biometric system [1] was introduced. This relies on unique features unchanged during the life time of a human, such as finger prints, iris etc.…”

“…Draw-A-Secret technique [22], Grid selection [3], and Pass doodle [14] are common examples of pure recallbased techniques. In 1999, Jermyn et al [22] proposed DAS (Draw-A-Secret) scheme, in which the password is a shape drawn on a two dimensional grid of size G * G as in Fig.…”

“…In 1999, Jermyn et al [22] proposed DAS (Draw-A-Secret) scheme, in which the password is a shape drawn on a two dimensional grid of size G * G as in Fig. 1 [3] to enhance the password space of DAS. Their study showed the impact of stroke-count on DAS password space which decreases significantly with less strokes for a fixed password length.…”

“…Different password mechanisms are introduced to over these attacks. In traditional authentication [3] approach the server maintains a password table [4] which stores the usernames and passwords. This procedure gives some compromising issues over the security of the users.…”

“…To address this problem, some researchers have developed authentication methods that use Graphical passwords [8]. These graphical passwords [1,3,9,10,11] are also suffered due to shoulder-surfing and screen-dump attacks [8]. For different scenarios we use different authentication techniques.…”