Enhancing click-draw based graphical passwords using multi-touch on mobile phones

Graphical password based authentication systems are now becoming one of the potential alternatives to alleviate current over-reliance on traditional text-based password authentication. With the rapid development of mobile devices (i.e., the increase of computing power), this kind of authentication systems has been implemented on mobile phones to authenticate legitimate users and detect impostors. But in real deployment, we notice that users can utilize more actions like multi-touch on a mobile phone than on a common computer. The action of multi-touch, which refers to the process of touching a touchscreen with multiple fingers at the same time, is a distinguished feature on a touchscreen mobile phone. In this paper, we therefore attempt to explore the effect of multi-touch on creating graphical passwords in the aspect of security and usability. In particular, we conduct a study of using click-draw based graphical passwords in the evaluation, which combines current input types in the area of graphical passwords, and we further develop a multi-touch enabled scheme on mobile phones. Three experiments were conducted with 60 participants and the experimental results indicate that, by integrating the action of multi-touch, graphical passwords can be generally enhanced in the aspect of both security and usability. Copyright © 2013 IFIP International Federation for Information Processing.