Evaluating the effect of user guidelines on creating click-draw based graphical passwords

Graphical passwords have become one of the possible alternatives for traditional text-based passwords in the aspect of user authentication on computers and networks. In general, this image-based authentication can be classified into three categories based on their input methods: click-based graphical passwords, choice-based graphical passwords and drawbased graphical passwords. To integrate the merits of the above three image-based authentication schemes, we have developed a prototype of click-draw based graphical password scheme (called CD-GPS) that combined current graphical password techniques and evaluated its performance with human users. In real deployment, we notice that user guidelines can affect the graphical password creation. However, the effect of user guidelines is seldom explored in the enrolment process of current graphical password schemes. In this study, we therefore aim to investigate the effect of giving user guidelines to users on the creation phase of our developed click-draw based graphical passwords. In particular, we conducted two experiments to explore the effect of user guidelines in our study with 60 participants and the experimental results indicate that by applying user guidelines into the phase of password creation, users can overall create better click-draw based graphical passwords. Copyright © 2012 ACM.