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On Cultural-centered Graphical Passwords: Leveraging on Users' Cultural Experiences for Improving Password Memorability
Abstract
Adaptive user authentication policies are moving in the center of attention lately aiming to assist users in creating memorable and secure passwords. Focusing on graphical user authentication, state-of-the-art research has provided evidence that image-related attributes affect password memorability and security. Nonetheless, the effects of users' contemporary cultural-related memories towards password memorability and security have not been investigated so far, although it is known that user authentication is a cross-cultural task. Aiming to shed light on whether such effects exist, we conducted a study in which users created a graphical password with a contemporary culture-intensive vs. a culture-neutral image. Results indicate that image content related to one's cultural-related memories affects the interaction behavior during password composition, and consequently password memorability. Findings point towards a promising new direction for considering human contemporary cultural memories in the design of adaptive password policies to increase memorability and preserve security.
... We conducted an exploratory study (analyzed and reported in [22]) with the aim to gain initial knowledge regarding security and memorability of the created password when the image content belongs in one of the intermediate sociocultural levels of the framework. [22]. ...
... We conducted an exploratory study (analyzed and reported in [22]) with the aim to gain initial knowledge regarding security and memorability of the created password when the image content belongs in one of the intermediate sociocultural levels of the framework. [22]. We refer to cultureintensive images as images that are relevant to the study participants' own culture (i.e., Greek), and to culture-neutral images as images that are not relevant to the study participants' own culture (i.e., China). ...
... Results (see [22]) indicate interdependencies between users' sociocultural experiences, the time to create a graphical password and memorability ( Table 1). Users that created graphical passwords with the national level image spent more time to create their password, exhibiting significant higher levels of memorability than users with the global level image. ...
Graphical user authentication schemes typically require users to draw a secret on a background image or select images on a grid. Although it is known that various image-related attributes affect security and memorability of generated passwords, current state-of-the-art approaches deliver image-content either randomly or based on the end-users' selections. Motivated by sociocultural theories which underpin that the meaning of an image varies across different people depending on their sociocultural background and experiences, in this paper we elaborate on a multi-layer image-content delivery approach which is supported by an initial framework that targets to deliver background images tailored to the unique sociocultural experiences of users. By doing so, we aim to trigger the users' sociocultural episodic memories, and ultimately help the creation of more secure and memorable passwords. Initial experimental results related to the value of this approach are also presented.
... For example, while in western countries adults mostly live independent of their parents, in eastern countries, parents asking and knowing everything about their children's lives is an accepted social norm [50]. Therefore, HCI (Human-Computer Interaction) scholars are increasingly interested in cross-cultural studies as a means to help them learn how digital products may be received by people in different cultures [8,20,21,27,78]. Privacy and security are the subjects of many such studies, especially in the context of online platforms such as social networks [34,56,57]. ...
... As security and privacy violations are usually irreversible [1], cross-cultural scholars in the field of HCI have spent a great effort to study privacy. For example, they studied the security measures of users in different cultures [20,21,56,57] and the privacy attitudes and behaviors of users in cross-cultural platforms such as social media [15,17,34,55,56,61,73,80]. More specifically in the field of online privacy, the "privacy by design" philosophy argues that technology design must be compatible with users' privacy attitudes and behaviors towards digital technologies [10]-these attitudes and behaviors can be deeply influenced by beliefs, norms and values that are culturally distinct [9,19,77]. ...
This paper addresses inconsistencies that exist in the measurement instruments HCI researchers use in cross-cultural studies. We study some commonly used measurement instruments that capture cultural dimensions at an individual level and conduct "measurement invariance tests," which test whether the questions comprising a construct have similar characteristics across different groups (e.g., countries). We find that these cultural dimensions are, to some extent, non-invariant, making statistical comparisons between countries problematic. Furthermore, we study the (non)invariance of the causal relationship between these cultural dimensions and privacy-related constructs, e.g., privacy concern and the amount of information users share on social media. Our results suggest that in several instances, these cultural dimensions have a different effect on privacy-related constructs per country. This severely reduces their usefulness for developing cross-cultural arguments in cross-country studies. We discuss the value of conducting measurement and causal non-invariance tests and urge scholars to develop more robust means of measuring culture.
... Intelligent user authentication schemes are moving in the center of attention lately [1,3,[7][8][9]16] aiming to assist users with the creation of secure and memorable passwords. Focusing on graphical user authentication (GUA) schemes, which require users to select images (or parts thereof) as their secret password, state-of-the-art research has provided evidence that the background images influence the strength of the graphical passwords [3,29,30,34,35]. ...
... Image Types. We expect that users will follow different approaches during password creation depending on the image content delivered to them (i.e., familiar vs. generic images) [8,9]. Furthermore, we expect that users from the familiar image group will make less hotspot selections for their passwords. ...
... A recent exploratory study [20] investigated the effects of users' contemporary cultural-related memories towards the security and memorability of graphical passwords. The authors suggested that it is possible to encourage users towards creating more memorable passwords through the delivery of "best-fit" background image content during graphical password creation. ...
... Considering the importance of the image content related to the security and usability aspects within graphical password schemes [6,7,8,20,21], a recent work in [22] investigated the feasibility of building a classifier, which was based on users' visual behavior with respect to the hotspots regions of the image, for the early prediction of the image content a user is processing during graphical password creation. Findings revealed that the image content type could be inferred with high accuracy within a few seconds, and such knowledge could be used in the design of real-time assistive and/or adaptive mechanisms within graphical password schemes. ...
Recent works underpin the added value of considering users' past sociocultural experiences as a personalization factor for the image content used within graphical password schemes, since it has a positive impact on the security and memorability of the user-chosen passwords. This paper discusses the need for personalization of the image content used in graphical password schemes, as well as the initial steps towards the realization of an image content personalization framework that aims to achieve a better equilibrium between security and memorability. The paper also discusses emerging challenges related to the elicitation and maintenance of individual sociocultural-centered user models, the image content personalization mechanism and privacy considerations.
... An application to offer personal storage for children was introduced by Yang et al. [17] to provide security for the personals of children for primary school syllabus. The application was named graphical password authentication for child personal storage application, and it offered personal storage for the notes in softcopy forms. ...
The information and security systems largely rely on passwords,which remain the fundamental part of any authentication process. The conventional authentication method based on alphanumerical username and password suffer from significant disadvantages. The graphical password-based authentication system has recently been introduced as an effective alternative. Although the graphical schemes effectively generate the passwords with better flexibility and enhanced security, the most common problem with this is the shoulder surfing attack. This paper proposes an effective 3D graphical password authentication system to overcome such drawbacks. The system is based on the selection of click points for generating passwords. The proposed work involved a training phase for evaluating the model in terms of the success rate. The overall evaluations of the model in terms of password entropy, password space, login success rates, and prediction probability in the shoulder surfing and guessing attacks proved that the model is more confidential and maintains a higher range of integrity than the other existing models.
... In the alphanumeric-password authentication, memorability is a significant challenge for users and graphical passwords are considered as more memorable, which demonstrate that users can memorize the graphical password for a long interval of time. Further, users can recall their passwords when they try to be authenticated after a week or a month [47,187]. ...
Authentication receives enormous consideration from the research community and it is proven to be an interesting field in today's era. User authentication is the major concern because people have their private data on devices. To strengthen user authentication, passwords have been introduced. In the past, the text-based password was the traditional way of authentication, but this method has particular shortcomings. The graphical password has introduced as an alternative, which uses a picture or a set of pictures to generate a password. In the future, it is a requirement of such approaches to maintain the robustness and consume less energy resources to become suitable for Green Internet of Things (IoT). Similarly, diverse graphical password authentication mechanisms have been used to provide users with better security and usability. In this article, we have conducted an extensive survey on the existing approaches of graphical password authentication to highlight the challenges required to be addressed for Green IoT. In comparison to other existing surveys, the objective is to consolidate the graphical password technique and to identify the problem associated with them. Besides, this survey will also identify the vulnerabilities of the graphical password against several potential attacks. We have also examined the strengths and weaknesses of each technique along with the future research directions. This study also evaluates the usability of each approach by considering learnability, memorability, etc. and also presents a comparative analysis with security.
... For existing online software or applications, the algorithm could recommend alternative usernames based on older adults' personal information such as their first and last name with simple numbers (e.g., first-namelastname01) or with special signage (e.g., username_senior, username_silver, etc.), rather than suggesting a username with combinations of random letters and numbers. In terms of designing senior-friendly passwords, researchers have proposed how culturalbased graphical passwords (e.g., selecting images of personal habits such as going to the concert) could improve users' memorability and reduce time to create or recall passwords [7]. In addition, passwordless authentication based on notifications from users' personal devices or on external devices would be another possible solution for older adults. ...
... Regardless of the culture group, participants who utilized cultural-external picture content made significantly higher percentage of picture password selections within hotspots segments compared to participants who utilized culture-internal picture content. This is in line with previous findings of our works [48,54], showing the positive effect of utilizing picture content related to people's daily life experiences and activities. Such a personalized picture content approach allows users to make their selections beyond the easy-toremember hotspots and rather based on their episodic memories within the depicted pictures [55][56][57], and eventually assists them with the creation of more secure picture passwords. ...
Picture passwords, which require users to draw selections on images as their secret password, typically provide globalized solutions without taking into consideration that people across diverse cultures exhibit differences within interactive systems.
Aiming to shed light on the effects of culture towards users’ interactions within picture password schemes, we conducted a between-subjects cross-cultural (Eastern vs. Western) study (n=67). Users created a password on a picture illustrating content highly related to their daily-life experiences (culture-internal) vs. a picture illustrating the same daily-life experiences, but in a different cultural context (culture-external). Results revealed that people across cultures exhibited differences in visual processing, comprehension, and exploration of the picture content prior to making their password selections. The observed differences can be accounted by considering sociocultural theories highlighting the holistic preference of Eastern populations compared to the analytic preference of Western populations. Qualitative data also triangulate the findings by
exposing the likeability and users’ engagement towards the picture content familiar to individual’s culture. Findings underpin the necessity to consider culturaldifferences in the design of personalized picture passwords.
... The aforementioned works have provided evidence that various image types, as well as various image-related attributes, influence users' selections during password creation, thus, leading to poor passwords. However, recent advancements within graphical password schemes underpinned the added value of considering users' prior sociocultural experiences as an important personalization factor for the image content used, which assists users with the creation of more secure and memorable graphical passwords [21][22][23]. Considering that graphical password creation is a two-step process that consists of: a) the image selection among a set of images; and b) the creation of the password on the selected image, what remains rather unexplored is to investigate whether the sociocultural-related image content impacts users' interaction and visual behavior at each step, which could in turn affect users' password selections. ...
Graphical passwords leverage the picture superiority effect to enhance memorability, and reflect today's haptic user interaction realms. Image content related to users’ past sociocultural experiences assists users with the creation of more secure and memorable passwords. Aiming to shed light on the effects of sociocultural-related image content towards graphical password selections, we conducted a between-subjects eye-tracking study (N=37) in which users selected one image among a set of images from their assigned image group (sociocultural-related vs. generic) that would be used for creating their graphical password. Results revealed differences in users’ interaction and visual behavior during image selection. Initial users’ feedback regarding the likeability and users’ engagement with the sociocultural-related image content is also presented.
... Bearing in mind that transition entropies of users have been correlated with security strength of graphical passwords [9,28] such findings can be of value for mixed reality researchers and experience designers for considering: a) users eye gaze patterns as early predictors of password security strength [28]; and b) human cognitive characteristics as important design factors in picture password schemes [9,24,34]. We anticipate that this work will inspire similar research endeavors (e.g., see the approaches discussed in [9,10,23,24,32,33] on how human factors can be incorporated in personalized user authentication schemes) aiming to incorporate novel authentication schemes based on eye tracking methods and users' eye gaze patterns. ...
Recent research revealed that individual cognitive differences affect visual behavior and task performance of picture passwords within conventional interaction realms such as desktops and tablets. Bearing in mind that mixed reality environments necessitate from end-users to perceive, process and comprehend visually-enriched content, this paper further investigates whether this new interaction realm amplifies existing observed effects of individual cognitive differences towards user interactions in picture passwords. For this purpose, we conducted a comparative eye tracking study (N = 50) in which users performed a picture password composition task within a conventional interaction context vs. a mixed reality context. For interpreting the derived results, we adopted an accredited human cognition theory that highlights cognitive differences in visual perception and search. Analysis of results revealed that new technology realms like mixed reality extend and, in some cases, amplify the effect of human cognitive differences towards users’ visual and interaction behavior in picture passwords. Findings can be of value for improving future implementations of picture passwords by considering human cognitive differences as a personalization factor for the design of user-adaptive graphical passwords in mixed reality.
KeywordsPicture passwordsHuman cognitionMixed realityEye trackingVisual behaviorUsabilitySecurity
... A majority of the user studies divulged throughout the course of this study gather their participants primarily through university settings (Naiakshina et al. 2018;Becker et al. 2018). These participants are often college aged, 18 to 22 years old, and by effect more technologically literate (Constantinides et al. 2018). Some of these studies even utilize computer science students and individuals who are employed professionally (Renaud & Zimmermann 2018). ...
Security vulnerabilities of traditional single factor authentication has become a major concern for security practitioners and researchers. To mitigate single point failures, new and technologically advanced Multi-Factor Authentication (MFA) tools have been developed as security solutions. However, the usability and adoption of such tools have raised concerns. An obvious solution can be viewed as conducting user studies to create more user-friendly MFA tools. To learn more, we performed a systematic literature review of recently published academic papers (N = 623) that primarily focused on MFA technologies. While majority of these papers (m = 300) proposed new MFA tools, only 9.1% of papers performed any user evaluation research. Our meta-analysis of user focused studies (n = 57) showed that researchers found lower adoption rate to be inevitable for MFAs, while avoidance was pervasive among mandatory use. Furthermore, we noted several reporting and methodological discrepancies in the user focused studies. We identified trends in participant recruitment that is indicative of demographic biases.
A thorough understanding of usable privacy research challenges is essential for ensuring high-quality research, improving methods and avoiding repeating mistakes, identifying research gap fillers, and advancing the field. In this chapter, we will examine some of the challenges associated with conducting usable privacy studies, such as the challenges of encompassing a variety of users, conflicting privacy and usability goals, privacy as a secondary objective, the privacy paradox, and issues related to measuring the right thing, the difficulty of conducting ecologically valid studies, and ethical and legal issues such as ethics of nudge and deception when conducting this type of research. We will further discuss the Human-Computer Interaction (HCI) challenges related to privacy technologies including the challenge of educating users on how privacy-enhancing technologies work and how to make online privacy transparent considering the effects of different factors such as information level, time, and medium through which we communicate to users that all play an important role in determining the effectiveness of transparency in protecting users’ privacy. This chapter concludes by discussing some specific HCI challenges associated with privacy laws, such as discrepancies between what privacy laws require and what users need and problems regarding notice and choice.
This paper proposes a user-adaptable and personalized authentication paradigm for healthcare organizations, which anticipates to seamlessly reflect patients’ episodic and autobiographical memories to graphical and textual passwords aiming to improve the security strength of user-selected passwords and provide a positive user experience. We report on a longitudinal study that spanned over three years in which three public European healthcare organizations participated in order to design and evaluate the aforementioned paradigm. Three studies were conducted ( n =169) with different stakeholders: i) a verification study aiming to identify existing authentication practices of the three healthcare organizations with diverse stakeholders ( n =9); ii) a patient-centric feasibility study during which users interacted with the proposed authentication system ( n =68); and iii) a human guessing attack study focusing on vulnerabilities among people sharing common experiences within location-aware images used for graphical passwords ( n =92). Results revealed that the suggested paradigm scored high with regards to users’ likeability, perceived security, usability and trust, but more importantly it assists the creation of more secure passwords. On the downside, the suggested paradigm introduces password guessing vulnerabilities by individuals sharing common experiences with the end-users. Findings are expected to scaffold the design of more patient-centric knowledge-based authentication mechanisms within nowadays dynamic computation realms.
Picture passwords, which require users to complete a picture-based task to login, are increasingly being embraced by researchers as they offer a better tradeoff between security and memorability. Recent works proposed the use of personalized familiar pictures, which are bootstrapped to the users’ prior sociocultural activities and experiences. However, such personalized approaches might entail guessing vulnerabilities by people close to the user (e.g., family members, acquaintances) with whom they share common experiences within the depicted familiar sceneries. To shed light on this aspect, we conducted a controlled in-lab eye-tracking user study (n = 18) focusing on human attack vulnerabilities among people sharing common sociocultural experiences. Results revealed that insider attackers, who share common experiences with the legitimate users, can easily identify regions of their selected secrets. The extra knowledge possessed by people close to the user was also reflected on their visual behavior during the human attack phase. Such findings can drive the design of assistive security mechanisms within personalized picture password schemes.
This paper suggests a novel cued-recall-based graphical authentication method, which leverages on users’ sociocultural experiences for improving the security and memorability of selected secrets. We evaluated the suggested approach in the context of three user studies (n=139): a) an eye-tracking study (n=42) focusing on security in terms of resistance to brute-force attacks; b) a two-week study (n=71) focusing on memorability and login usability; and c) a controlled in-lab user study (n=26) focusing on human attack vulnerabilities among people sharing common sociocultural experiences. Analysis of results revealed that the suggested approach influenced visual behavior strategies of end-users, which subsequently resulted in significantly stronger passwords created on images reflecting their prior experiences than on images unfamiliar to them. Simultaneously, both reference and control groups performed similarly in terms of memorability and login efficiency and effectiveness. On the downside, the suggested approach introduces password guessing vulnerabilities in terms of allowing attackers who share common experiences with the end-users to more easily identify regions of their selected secrets. Findings point towards a new direction for delivering personalized cued-recall graphical authentication schemes that depict image semantics bootstrapped to users’ real-life experiences.
The Government of Bangladesh is aggressively transforming its public service landscape by transforming public services into online services via a number of websites. The motivation is that this would be a catalyst for a transformative change in every aspect of citizen life. Some web services must be protected from any unauthorised usages and passwords remain the most widely used credential mechanism for this purpose. However, if passwords are not adopted properly, they can be a cause for security breach. That is why it is important to study different aspects of password security on different websites. In this paper, we present a study of password security among 36 different Bangladeshi government websites against six carefully-chosen password security heuristics. This study is the first of its kind in this domain and offers interesting insights. For example, many websites have not adopted proper security measures with respect to security. There is no password construction guideline adopted by many websites, thus creating a barrier for users to select a strong password. Some of them allow supposedly weak passwords and still do not utilise a secure HTTPS channel to transmit information over the Internet.
Visual attention, search, processing and comprehension are important cognitive tasks during a graphical password composition activity. Aiming to shed light on whether individual differences on visual behavior affect the strength of the created passwords, we conducted an eye-tracking study (N=36), and adopted an accredited cognitive style theory to interpret the results. The analysis revealed that users with different cognitive styles followed different patterns of visual behavior which affected the strength of the created passwords. Motivated, by the results of the first study, we introduced adaptive characteristics to the user authentication mechanism, aiming to assist specific cognitive style user groups to create more secure passwords, and conducted a second study with a new sample (N=40) to test the adaptive characteristics. Results strengthen our assumptions that adaptive mechanisms based on users' differences in cognitive and visual behavior uncover a new perspective for improving the password's strength within graphical user authentication realms.
Numerous graphical authentication ideas have been proposed on how to address the security and usability of text-based passwords. However, it remains unclear how users approach graphical password selection and the inherent personal bias when selecting images. This study investigates user choices in password selection for recognition-based graphical authentication. Our analysis is based on a total of 302 participants continuously using a graphical authentication system during a 6-week long study. The results show pronounced preference effects for image properties such as color, shape, and category. Additionally, there is a significant difference between genders in the selected images based on the same properties.
In one embodiment, a picture signature password system may use a picture signature password to determine access to a computing device or service. A display screen 172 may display a personalized digital image 310. A user input device 160 may receive a user drawing set executed by a user over the personalized digital image 310. A processor 120 may authenticate access to the user session if the user drawing set matches a library drawing set associated with the user.
We present the results of an online survey of smartphone unlocking (N=8,286) that we conducted in eight different countries. The goal was to investigate differences in attitudes towards smartphone unlocking between different national cultures. Our results show that there are indeed significant differences across a range of categories. For instance, participants in Japan considered the data on their smartphones to be much more sensitive than those in other countries, and respondents in Germany were 4.5 times more likely than others to say that protecting data on their smartphones was important. The results of this study shed light on how motivations to use various security mechanisms are likely to differ from country to country.
Common user authentication methods on smartphones, such as lock patterns, PINs, or passwords, impose a trade-off between security and password memorability. Image-based passwords were proposed as a secure and usable alternative. As of today, however, it remains unclear how such schemes are used in the wild. We present the first study to investigate how image-based passwords are used over long periods of time in the real world. Our analyses are based on data from 2318 unique devices collected over more than one year using a custom application released in the Android Play store. We present an in-depth analysis of what kind of images users select, how they define their passwords, and how secure these passwords are. Our findings provide valuable insights into real-world use of image-based passwords and inform the design of future graphical authentication schemes.
Preparing students adequately against online-attacks is a constant teaching and learning challenge, no matter how many advanced security-related courses have been developed for higher education curricula worldwide. Recently emphasis has also been put on online identity theft and social awareness in general. The authors research the knowledge, skills and attitudes of future IT professionals, from a cross-cultural and gender perspective. The available data were collected from international students in Software Engineering and other IT related disciplines via a questionnaire. The processed data revealed that (i) students are not free of security misconceptions, which security education is called upon to address and (ii) courses about online security can be part of a strategy for increasing social awareness on privacy protection. This pilot survey also revealed that the following issues are crucial: (a) the cultural and gender dimensions, (b) personality traits and (c) teaching methodology and learning environment used for security education. The researchers specify strategic guidelines in higher education for timely privacy protection and citizens’ security. The information provided in this study will be practical and useful for curricula design and formal/informal learning practices. Hence, courses on security can be thought-provoking, interesting throughout the learning process and effective regarding the learning outcomes.
Picture gesture authentication has been recently introduced as an alternative login experience to text-based password on touch-screen devices. In particular, the newly on market Microsoft Windows 8 TM operating system adopts such an alternative authentication to complement its traditional text-based authentication. We present an empirical analysis of picture gesture authentication on more than 10,000 picture passwords collected from over 800 subjects through online user studies. Based on the findings of our user studies, we propose a novel attack framework that is capable of cracking passwords on previously unseen pictures in a picture gesture authentication system. Our approach is based on the concept of selection function that models users' thought processes in selecting picture passwords. Our evaluation results show the proposed approach could crack a considerable portion of picture passwords under different settings. Based on the empirical analysis and attack results, we comparatively evaluate picture gesture authentication using a set of criteria for a better understanding of its advantages and limitations.
Graphical password is an alternative method of authentication to alphanumerical passwords. From the perspective of research on human memory, it is yet another novel technology that introduces challenges on human memory components. In this study, we aim to investigate the previous findings in human visual memory in the domain of graphical passwords by analyzing the role of visual coherence in passwords. The results of an experimental study reveal that in terms of memorability, coherent images are better candidates as graphical password images than jumbled images.
Graphical password systems based upon the recall and reproduction of visual patterns (e.g. as seen on the Google Android platform) are assumed to have desirable usability and memorability properties. However, there are no empirical studies that explore whether this is actually the case on an everyday basis. In this paper, we present the results of a real world user study across 21 days that was conducted to gather such insight; we compared the performance of Android-like patterns to personal identification numbers (PIN), both on smartphones, in a field study. The quantitative results indicate that PIN outperforms the pattern lock when comparing input speed and error rates. However, the qualitative results suggest that users tend to accept this and are still in favor of the pattern lock to a certain extent. For instance, it was rated better in terms of ease-of-use, feedback and likeability. Most interestingly, even though the pattern lock does not provide any undo or cancel functionality, it was rated significantly better than PIN in terms of error recovery; this provides insight into the relationship between error prevention and error recovery in user authentication.
Computing devices with touch-screens have experienced unprecedented growth in recent years. Such an evolutionary advance has been facilitated by various applications that are heavily relying on multi-touch gestures. In addition, picture gesture authentication has been recently introduced as an alternative login experience to text-based password on such devices. In particular, the new Microsoft Windows 8 operating system adopts such an alternative authentication to complement traditional text-based authentication. In this paper, we present an empirical analysis of picture gesture authentication on more than 10,000 picture passwords collected from over 800 subjects through online user studies. Based on the findings of our user studies, we also propose a novel attack framework that is capable of cracking passwords on previously unseen pictures in a picture gesture authentication system. Our approach is based on the concept of selection function that models users' password selection processes. Our evaluation results show the proposed approach could crack a considerable portion of collected picture passwords under different settings.
While a large body of research on image-based authentication has focused on memorability, comparatively less attention has been paid to the new security challenges these schemes may introduce. Because images can convey more information than text, image-based authentication may be more vulnerable to educated guess attacks than passwords. In this paper, we evaluate the resilience of a recognition-based graphical authentication scheme using distorted images against two types of educated guess attacks through two user studies.
The first study, consisting of 30 participants, investigates whether distortion prevents educated guess attacks primarily based on information about individual users. The second study, using Amazon Mechanical Turk, investigates whether distortion mitigates the risk of educated guess attacks based on collective information about users. Our results show that authentication images without distortion are vulnerable to educated guess attacks, especially when information about the target is known, and that distortion makes authentication images more resilient against educated guess attacks.
In this paper, we propose and evaluate Use Your Illusion, a novel mechanism for user authentication that is secure and usable regard- less of the size of the device on which it is used. Our system relies on the human ability to recognize a degraded version of a previ- ously seen image. We illustrate how distorted images can be used to maintain the usability of graphical password schemes while mak- ing them more resilient to social engineering or observation attacks. Because it is difficult to mentally "revert" a degraded image, with- out knowledge of the original image, our scheme provides a strong line of defense against impostor access, while preserving the desir- able memorability properties of graphical password schemes. Using low-fidelity tests to aid in the design, we implement pro- totypes of Use Your Illusion as i) an Ajax-based web service and ii) on Nokia N70 cellular phones. We conduct a between-subjects usability study of the cellular phone prototype with a total of 99 participants in two experiments. We demonstrate that, regardless of their age or gender, users are very skilled at recognizing de- graded versions of self-chosen images, even on small displays and after time periods of one month. Our results indicate that graphical passwords with distorted images can achieve equivalent error rates to those using traditional images, but only when the original image is known.
Graphical passwords are an alternative to alphanumeric passwords in which users click on images to authenticate themselves rather than type alphanumeric strings. We have developed one such system, called PassPoints, and evaluated it with human users. The results of the evaluation were promising with respect to rmemorability of the graphical password. In this study we expand our human factors testing by studying two issues: the effect of tolerance, or margin of error, in clicking on the password points and the effect of the image used in the password system. In our tolerance study, results show that accurate memory for the password is strongly reduced when using a small tolerance (10 x 10 pixels) around the user's password points. This may occur because users fail to encode the password points in memory in the precise manner that is necessary to remember the password over a lapse of time. In our image study we compared user performance on four everyday images. The results indicate that there were few significant differences in performance of the images. This preliminary result suggests that many images may support memorability in graphical password systems.
Graphical password systems based on the recognition of photographs are candidates to alleviate current over-reliance on alphanumeric passwords and PINs. However, despite being based on a simple concept -- and user evaluations consistently reporting impressive memory retention -- only one commercial example exists and overall take-up is low. Barriers to uptake include a perceived vulnerability to observation attacks; issues regarding deployability; and the impact of innocuous design decisions on security not being formalized. Our contribution is to dissect each of these issues in the context of mobile devices -- a particularly suitable application domain due to their increasing significance, and high potential to attract unauthorized access. This produces: 1) A novel yet simple solution to the intersection attack that permits greater variability in login challenges; 2) Detailed analysis of the shoulder surfing threat that considers both simulated and human testing; 3) A first look at image processing techniques to contribute towards automated photograph filtering. We operationalize our observations and gather data in a field context where decentralized mechanisms of varying entropy were installed on the personal devices of participants. Across two working weeks success rates collected from users of a high entropy version were similar to those of a low entropy version at 77%, and login durations decreased significantly across the study.
The global expansion of the use of online communities, including social networking sites, necessitates a better understanding of how people self-disclose online, particularly in different cultures. In a scenario-based study of 1,064 respondents from the United States and China, we aimed to understand how self-disclosure is affected by communication mode (face-to-face vs. online), type of relationship and national culture. Our findings show that national culture interacts with communication mode and type of relationship to affect the extent of self-disclosure. Our analysis also suggests that peoples' disclosure depends on characteristics of the relationship, e.g., closeness and openness. Our results shed new light on how online communities might be designed for users in different cultures and for intercultural collaboration.
In this article we present the development of a new, web-based, graphical authentication mechanism called ImagePass. The authentication mechanism introduces a novel feature based on one-time passwords that increases the security of the system without compromising its usability. Regarding usability, we explore the users’ perception of recognition-based, graphical authentication mechanisms in a web environment. Specifically, we investigate whether the memorability of recognition-based authentication keys is influenced by image content. We also examine how the frequency of use affects the usability of the system and whether user training via mnemonic instructions improves the graphical password recognition rate. The design and development process of the proposed system began with a study that assessed how the users remember abstract, face or single-object images, and showed that single-object images have a higher memorability rate. We then proceeded with the design and development of a recognition-based graphical authentication mechanism, ImagePass, which uses single-objects as the image content and follows usable security guidelines. To conclude the research, in a follow-up study we evaluated the performance of 151 participants under different conditions. We discovered that the frequency of use had a great impact on users’ performance, while the users’ gender had a limited task-specific effect. In contrast, user training through mnemonic instructions showed no differences in the users’ authentication metrics. However, a post-study, focus-group analysis revealed that these instructions greatly influenced the users’ perception for memorability and the usability of the graphical authentication. In general, the results of these studies suggest that single-object graphical authentication can be a complementary replacement for traditional passwords, especially in ubiquitous environments and mobile devices.
A large body of research documents cognitive differences between Westerners and East Asians. Westerners tend to be more analytic and East Asians tend to be more holistic. These findings have often been explained as being due to corresponding differences in social orientation. Westerners are more independent and Easterners are more interdependent. However, comparisons of the cognitive tendencies of Westerners and East Asians do not allow us to rule out alternative explanations for the cognitive differences, such as linguistic and genetic differences, as well as cultural differences other than social orientation. In this review we summarize recent developments which provide stronger support for the social orientation hypothesis.
East Asians and Westerners perceive the world and think about it in very different ways. Westerners are inclined to attend to some focal object, analyzing its attributes and categorizing it in an effort to find out what rules govern its behavior. Rules used include formal logic. Causal attributions tend to focus exclusively on the object and are therefore often mistaken. East Asians are more likely to attend to a broad perceptual and conceptual field, noticing relationships and changes and grouping objects based on family resemblance rather than category membership. Causal attributions emphasize the context. Social factors are likely to be important in directing attention. East Asians live in complex social networks with prescribed role relations. Attention to context is important to effective functioning. More independent Westerners live in less constraining social worlds and have the luxury of attending to the object and their goals with respect to it. The physical "affordances" of the environment may also influence perception. The built environments of the East are more complex and contain more objects than do those of the West. In addition, artistic products of the East emphasize the field and deemphasize individual objects, including people. Western art renders less of the field and emphasizes individual objects and people.
Recent research provides evidence that individual differences in human cognitive styles affect user performance and experience in diverse application domains. However, state-of-the-art elicitation methods of cognitive styles require researchers to apply explicit, in-lab, and time-consuming "paper-and-pencil" techniques, rendering real-time integration of cognitive styles? elicitation impractical in interactive system design. Aiming to elaborate an implicit elicitation method of cognitive styles, this paper reports two feasibility studies based on an eye-tracking multifactorial model. In both studies, participants performed visual activities of varying characteristics, and the eye-tracking analysis revealed quantitative differences on visual behavior among individuals with different cognitive styles. Based on these differences, a series of classification experiments were conducted, and the results revealed that gaze-based implicit elicitation of cognitive styles in real-time is feasible, which could be used by interactive systems to adapt to the users' cognitive needs and preferences, to better assist them, and improve their performance and experience.
This paper investigates the interplay among human cognitive processing differences (field dependence vs. field independence), alternative interaction device types (desktop vs. touch) and user authentication schemes (textual vs. graphical) towards task completion efficiency and effectiveness. A four-month user study (N=164) was performed under the light of the field dependence-independence theory which underpins human cognitive differences in visual perceptiveness as well as differences in handling contextual information in a holistic or analytic manner. Quantitative and qualitative analysis of results revealed that field independent (FI) users outperformed field dependent users (FD) in graphical authentication, FIs authenticated similarly well on desktop computers as on touch devices, while touch devices negatively affected textual password entry performance of FDs. Users’ feedback from a post-study survey further showed that FD users had memorability issues with graphical authentication and perceived the added difficulty when interacting with textual passwords on touch devices, in contrast to FI users that did not have significant usability and memorability issues on both authentication and interaction device types. Findings highlight the necessity to improve current approaches of knowledge-based user authentication research by incorporating human cognitive factors in both design and run-time. Such an approach is also proposed in this paper.
Computer security tools usually provide universal solutions without taking user characteristics (origin, income level, ...) into account. In this paper, we test the validity of using such universal security defenses, with a particular focus on culture. We apply the previously proposed Security Behavior Intentions Scale (SeBIS) to 3,500 participants from seven countries. We first translate the scale into seven languages while preserving its reliability and structure validity. We then build a regression model to study which factors affect participants' security behavior. We find that participants from different countries exhibit different behavior. For instance, participants from Asian countries, and especially Japan, tend to exhibit less secure behavior. Surprisingly to us, we also find that actual knowledge influences user behavior much less than user self-confidence in their computer security knowledge. Stated differently, what people think they know affects their security behavior more than what they do know.
Online Behavioral Advertising (OBA), which involves tracking peopleâs online behaviors, raises serious privacy concerns. We present results from a scenario-based online survey study on American and Chinese Internet usersâ privacy preferences of OBA. Since privacy is context-dependent, we investigated the effects of country (US vs. China), activity (e.g., online shopping vs. online banking), and platform (desktop/laptop vs. mobile app) on peopleâs willingness to share their information for OBA. We found that American respondents were significantly less willing to share their data and had more specific concerns than their Chinese counterparts. We situate these differences in the broader historical, legal, and social scenes of these countries. We also found that respondentsâ OBA preferences varied significantly across different online activities, suggesting the potential of context-aware privacy tools for OBA. However, we did not find a significant effect of platform on peopleâs OBA preferences. Lastly, we discuss design implications for privacy tools.
A Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is a widely used Human Interaction Proof mechanism to protect on-line services against automated software agents. Nowadays, there is a consensus among researchers, practitioners and users that current design approaches of CAPTCHA need to be improved in order to provide a fair trade-off solution between security and usability. In this paper, we propose a shift from a generic Human Interaction Proof (HIP) to a more user-friendly Individual Human Interaction Proof (iHIP) approach by incorporating a dynamic and extendable human and technology factor based user-centric framework. Such an approach provides an alternative point of view to current state of the art practices aiming to deliver the best-fit CAPTCHA to each individual by taking into consideration contextual and behavioral interaction data.
Microsoft's Picture Password provides a method to authenticate a user without the need of typing a character based password. The password consists of a set of gestures drawn on an image. The position, direction and order of these gestures constitute the password. Besides being more convenient to use on touch screen devices, this authentication method promises improved memorability in addition to improving the password strength against guessing attacks. However, how unpredictable is the picture password? In this paper we exploit the fact that different users are drawn to similar image regions, and therefore these passwords are vulnerable to guessing attacks. More specifically, we show that for portrait pictures users are strongly drawn to use facial features as gesture locations. We collect a set of Picture Passwords and, using computer vision techniques, derive a list of password guesses in decreasing probability order. We show that guessing in this order we are able to improve the likelihood of cracking a password within a limited number of guesses.
Aiming to ensure safety of operation to application providers and improve the usability of human computer interactions during authentication, this paper proposes a two-step personalization approach of user authentication tasks based on individual differences in cognitive processing as follows: i) recommend a textual or graphical user authentication mechanism based on the users’ cognitive styles of processing textual and graphical information, and ii) recommend a standard or enhanced authentication key strength policy considering the users’ cognitive processing abilities. The proposed approach has been applied in a four month ecological valid user study in which 137 participants interacted with a personalized user authentication mechanism and policy based on their cognitive characteristics. Initial results indicate that personalizing the user authentication task based on human cognitive factors could provide a viable solution for balancing the security and usability of authentication mechanisms at the benefit of both application providers and end-users.
Typing text passwords is challenging when using touchscreens on mobile devices and this is becoming more problematic as mobile usage increases. We designed a new graphical password scheme called Touchscreen Multi-layered Drawing (TMD) specifically for use with touchscreens. We conducted an exploratory user study of three existing graphical passwords on smart phones and tablets with 31 users. From this, we set our design goals for TMD to include addressing input accuracy issues without having to memorize images, while maintaining an appropriately secure password space. Design features include warp cells which allow TMD users to continuously draw their passwords across multiple layers in order to create more complex passwords than normally possible on a small screen. We compared the usability of TMD to Draw A Secret (DAS) on a tablet computer and a smart phone with 90 users. Results show that TMD improves memorability, addresses the input accuracy issues, and is preferred as a replacement for text passwords on mobile devices.
Graphical passwords are an alternative form of authentication that use images for login, and leverage the picture superiority effect for good usability and memorability. Categories of graphical passwords have been distinguished on the basis of different kinds of memory retrieval (recall, cued-recall, and recognition). Psychological research suggests that leveraging recognition memory should be best, but this remains an open question in the password literature. This paper examines how different kinds of memory retrieval affect the memorability and usability of random assigned graphical passwords. A series of five studies of graphical and text passwords showed that participants were able to better remember recognition-based graphical passwords, but their usability was limited by slow login times. A graphical password scheme that leveraged recognition and recall memory was most successful at combining memorability and usability.
Saliency estimation has become a valuable tool in image processing. Yet, existing approaches exhibit considerable variation in methodology, and it is often difficult to attribute improvements in result quality to specific algorithm properties. In this paper we reconsider some of the design choices of previous methods and propose a conceptually clear and intuitive algorithm for contrast-based saliency estimation. Our algorithm consists of four basic steps. First, our method decomposes a given image into compact, perceptually homogeneous elements that abstract unnecessary detail. Based on this abstraction we compute two measures of contrast that rate the uniqueness and the spatial distribution of these elements. From the element contrast we then derive a saliency measure that produces a pixel-accurate saliency map which uniformly covers the objects of interest and consistently separates fore- and background. We show that the complete contrast and saliency estimation can be formulated in a unified way using high-dimensional Gaussian filters. This contributes to the conceptual simplicity of our method and lends itself to a highly efficient implementation with linear complexity. In a detailed experimental evaluation we analyze the contribution of each individual feature and show that our method outperforms all state-of-the-art approaches.
While prior studies have provided us with an initial understanding of people’s location-sharing privacy preferences, they have been limited to Western countries and have not investigated the impact of the granularity of location disclosures on people’s privacy preferences. We report findings of a 3-week comparative study collecting location traces and location-sharing preferences from two comparable groups in the United States and China. Results of the study shed further light on the complexity of people’s location-sharing privacy preferences and key attributes influencing willingness to disclose locations to others and to advertisers. While our findings reveal many similarities between US and Chinese participants, they also show interesting differences, such as differences in willingness to share location at “home” and at “work” and differences in the granularity of disclosures people feel comfortable with. We conclude with a discussion of implications for the design of location-sharing applications and location-based advertising.
Research by Herman A. Witkin reports that one aspect of cognitive style, namely field dependence/field independence, is affected significantly by socialization and child-rearing practices. The present cross-cultural project, using the Children's Embedded Figures Test, examined the cognitive style of 100 African American and 100 Black South African males and females in grades 4 and 5. Hierarchical loglinear models were utilized to uncover the complex relationships between gender (males and females), culture (African Americans and Black South Africans) and learning style (field dependence and field independence). The results were significant and suggest that African Americans are more likely to be using a learning style characterized by field independence and Black South Africans are more likely to be using a learning style characterized by field dependence. No differences were found relative to gender for either group or for the two groups combined. Although no formal cross-cultural research has previously been done relative to cognitive style in the context ofthese two groups, the findings are consistent with the overall theoretical and historical research relative to field dependence and field independence.
Although motivated by both usability and security concerns, the existing literature on click-based graphical password schemes using a single background image (e.g., PassPoints) has focused largely on usability. We examine the security of such schemes, including the impact of different background images, and strategies for guessing user passwords. We report on both short- and long-term user studies: one lab-controlled, involving 43 users and 17 diverse images, and the other a field test of 223 user accounts. We provide empirical evidence that popular points (hot-spots) do exist for many images, and explore two different types of attack to exploit this hot-spotting: (1) a "human-seeded" attack based on harvesting click-points from a small set of users, and (2) an entirely automated attack based on image processing techniques. Our most effective attacks are generated by harvesting password data from a small set of users to attack other targets. These attacks can guess 36% of user passwords within 231 guesses (or 12% within 216 guesses) in one instance, and 20% within 233 guesses (or 10% within 218 guesses) in a second instance. We perform an image-processing attack by implementing and adapting a bottom-up model of visual attention, resulting in a purely automated tool that can guess up to 30% of user passwords in 235 guesses for some instances, but under 3% on others. Our results suggest that these graphical password schemes appear to be at least as susceptible to offline attack as the traditional text passwords they were proposed to replace.
Starting around 1999, a great many graphical password schemes have been proposed as alterna-tives to text-based password authentication. We provide a comprehensive overview of published research in the area, covering both usability and security aspects, as well as system evaluation. The paper first catalogues existing approaches, highlighting novel features of selected schemes and identifying key usability or security advantages. We then review usability requirements for knowledge-based authentication as they apply to graphical passwords, identify security threats that such systems must address and review known attacks, discuss methodological issues related to empirical evaluation, and identify areas for further research and improved methodology.
Numerous graphical password schemes have re-cently been proposed as alternatives to traditional text pass-word authentication. We provide a comprehensive overview of published research in the area, covering both usability and security aspects, as well as system evaluation. The paper first catalogues existing approaches, highlighting novel features of selected schemes and identifying key usability or security ad-vantages. We then review usability requirements for knowledge-based authentication as they apply to graphical passwords, identify security threats that such systems should address, review methodological issues related to empirical evaluation, and identify areas for further research and improved methodology.
In this paper we propose and evaluate new graphical password schemes that exploit features of graphical input displays to achieve better security than text-based passwords. Graphical input devices enable the user to decouple the position of inputs from the temporal order in which those inputs occur, and we show that this decoupling can be used to generate password schemes with substantially larger memo-rable password spaces. In order to evaluate the se-curity of one of our schemes, we devise a novel way to capture a subset of the memorable" passwords that, we believe, is itself a contribution. In this work we are primarily motivated by devices such as per-sonal digital assistants PDAs that ooer graphical input capabilities via a stylus, and we describe our prototype implementation of one of our password schemes on such a P D A, namely the Palm Pilot TM .
Computer security depends largely on passwords to authenticate human users. However, users have difficulty remembering passwords over time if they choose a secure password, i.e. a password that is long and random. Therefore, they tend to choose short and insecure passwords. Graphical passwords, which consist of clicking on images rather than typing alphanumeric strings, may help to overcome the problem of creating secure and memorable passwords. In this paper we describe PassPoints, a new and more secure graphical password system. We report an empirical study comparing the use of PassPoints to alphanumeric passwords. Participants created and practiced either an alphanumeric or graphical password. The participants subsequently carried out three longitudinal trials to input their password over the course of 6 weeks. The results show that the graphical password users created a valid password with fewer difficulties than the alphanumeric users. However, the graphical users took longer and made more invalid password inputs than the alphanumeric users while practicing their passwords. In the longitudinal trials the two groups performed similarly on memory of their password, but the graphical group took more time to input a password.
We present a study that investigates American, Chinese, and Indian social networking site (SNS) users’ privacy attitudes and
practices. We conducted an online survey of users of three popular SNSs in these countries. Based on 924 valid responses from
the three countries, we found that generally American respondents were the most privacy concerned, followed by the Chinese
and Indians. However, the US sample exhibited the lowest level of desire to restrict the visibility of their SNS information
to certain people (e.g., co-workers). The Chinese respondents showed significantly higher concerns about identity issues on
SNS such as fake names and impersonation.
Draw a secret (DAS) is a representative graphical password scheme. Rigorous theoretical analysis suggests that DAS supports an overall password space larger than that of the ubiquitous textual password scheme. However, recent research suggests that DAS users tend to choose weak passwords, and their choices would render this theoretically sound scheme less secure in real life. In this paper we investigate the novel idea of introducing back- ground images to the DAS scheme, where users were initially supposed to draw passwords on a blank canvas overlaid with a grid. Encouraging results from our two user studies have shown that people aided with background images tended to set significantly more complicated passwords than their counterparts using the original scheme. The background images also reduced other predictable characteristics in DAS passwords such as symmetry and centering within the drawing grid, further improving the strength of the passwords. We estimate that the average strength of successfully recalled passwords in the enhanced scheme was increased over those created using the original scheme by more than 10 bits. Moreover, a positive effect was observed with respect to the memorability of the more complex passwords encouraged by the background images.
Graphical password systems have received significant attention as one potential solution to the need for more usable authentication, but nearly all prior work makes the unrealistic assumption of studying a single password. This paper presents the first study of multiple graphical passwords to systematically examine frequency of access to a graphical password, interference resulting from interleaving access to multiple graphical passwords, and patterns of access while training multiple graphical passwords. We find that all of these factors significantly impact the ease of authenticating using multiple facial graphical passwords. For example, participants who accessed four different graphical passwords per week were ten times more likely to completely fail to authenticate than participants who accessed a single password once per week. Our results underscore the need for more realistic evaluations of the use of multiple graphical passwords, have a number of implications for the adoption of graphical password systems, and provide a new basis for comparing proposed graphical password systems. Author Keywords
Graphical password schemes have been proposed as an alternative to text passwords in applications that support graphics and mouse or stylus entry. In this paper we detail what is, to our knowledge, the largest published empirical evaluation of the effects of user choice on the security of graphical password schemes. We show that permitting user selection of passwords in two graphical password schemes, one based directly on an existing commercial product, can yield passwords with entropy far below the the- oretical optimum and, in some cases, that are highly correlated with the race or gender of the user. For one scheme, this effect is so dramatic so as to ren- der the scheme insecure. A conclusion of our work is that graphical password schemes of the type we study may generally require a different posture to- ward password selection than text passwords, where selection by the user remains the norm today.
Click-based graphical passwords, which involve clic king a set of user-selected points, have been proposed as a usabl e alternative to text passwords. We conducted two user studies: an i nitial lab study to revisit these usability claims, explore fo r the first time the impact on usability of a wide-range of images, and gather information about the points selected by users; and a large-scale field study to examine how click-based graphical pa sswords work in practice. No such prior field studies have been reported in the literature. We found significant differences in the usability results of the two studies, providing empirical evidence th at relying solely on lab studies for security interfaces can b e problematic. We also present a first look at whether interferenc e from having multiple graphical passwords affects usability and whether more memorable passwords are necessarily weaker in terms of security.
We provide an in-depth study of the security of click-based graphical password schemes like PassPoints (Weidenbeck et al., 2005), by exploring popular points (hot-spots), and examining strategies to predict and exploit them in guessing attacks. We report on both short- and long-term user studies: one lab-controlled, involving 43 users and 17 diverse images, the other a field test of 223 user accounts. We provide empirical evidence that hot-spots do exist for many images, some more so than others. We explore the use of “human-computation” (in this context, harvesting click-points from a small set of users) to predict these hot-spots. We generate two “human-seeded” attacks based on this method: one based on a first-order Markov model, another based on an independent probability model. Within 100 guesses, our first-order Markov model-based attack finds 4% of passwords in one image's data set, and 10% of passwords in a second image's data set. Our independent model-based attack finds 20% within 2 33 guesses in one image's data set and 36% within 2 31 guesses in a second image's data set. These are all for a system whose full password space has cardinality 2 43. We evaluate our first-order Markov model-based attack with cross-validation of the field study data, which finds an average of 7-10% of user passwords within 3 guesses. We also begin to explore some click-order pattern attacks, which we found improve on our independent model-based attacks. Our results suggest that these graphical password schemes (with parameters as originally proposed) are vulnerable to offline and online attacks, even on systems that implement conservative lock-out policies.
Signing in with a picture password
- Zachary Pace
Zachary Pace (2011). Signing in with a picture password. Retrieved from
https://blogs.msdn.microsoft.com/b8/2011/12/16/signing-in-with-a-picturepassword
Diversify to Survive: Making Passwords Stronger with Adaptive Policies
- S M Segreti
- W Melicher
- S Komanduri
- D Melicher
- R Shay
- B Ur
- L Bauer
- N Christin
- L F Cranor
- M L Mazurek
Segreti, S.M., Melicher, W., Komanduri, S., Melicher, D., Shay, R., Ur, B.,
Bauer, L., Christin, N., Cranor, L.F. and Mazurek, M.L. (2017). Diversify to
Survive: Making Passwords Stronger with Adaptive Policies. In Symposium on
Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS)
The Science Behind Passfaces
Real User Corporation (2004). The Science Behind Passfaces. Technical report.