PassFile: Graphical password authentication based on file browsing records

With the rapid growth of smartphone shipments, it has become a necessity to safeguard the mobile devices from unauthorized access (e.g., in case of stolen or lost). To complement traditional textual passwords, graphical password is believed to be a promising alternative, which requires users to create their credentials based on image(s). However, many complicated graphical password schemes may increase the memory load of a user. In practice, a usable graphical password scheme is often designed based on users’ own knowledge. In this work, we introduce PassFile, a graphical password authentication scheme based on file browsing records on mobile devices. It requires a user to select the most frequently used applications from the mobile devices as authentication token. In the user study, our results indicate that our proposed PassFile can provide a high login success rate (over 96%). Copyright © 2024 The Author(s), under exclusive license to Springer Nature Singapore Pte Ltd.