A shoulder-surfing resistant scheme embedded in traditional passwords

Abstract

Typing passwords is vulnerable to shoulder-surfing attacks. We proposed a shoulder-surfing resistant scheme embedded in traditional textual passwords in this study. With the proposed scheme, when the password field is on focus, a pattern appears in it as a hint to tell the user how to enter a password. Following the hint, the user needs to skip some characters while typing the password. The characters to be skipped are randomly selected so that an observer will not be able to see the whole password even if the authentication procedure was recorded. We evaluated the proposed scheme in a usability study. Compared to traditional passwords, our scheme achieved a similar level of accuracy while only required marginal additional time to authenticate users. Participants also expressed significantly higher acceptance of the new technique for security-sensitive applications and gave it significantly higher ratings in perceived security, shoulders-surfing resistance, camera-recording resistance, and guess-attack resistance.