Graphical passwords: Behind the attainment of goals

Abstract

Graphical authentication methods have emerged as an alternative to the conventional authentication methods over the past couple of decades. One of the most popular among types of graphical authentication methods is recognition‐based authentication, where the user taps on pass images from one or more challenge sets of images in order to authenticate. The study of existing graphical authentication systems shows that several of them compromise their security while making the method simpler, which could lead to perpetration of numerous attacks like guessing, hidden camera, smudge, shoulder surfing, and many other. Furthermore, a few of them sacrifice performance while targeting security alone. Yet, this paper proposes a new method that resists the aforementioned attacks with good performance, while preserving the benefits of graphical passwords such as ease of use and increased memorability.