IPAS: User Test Phase and Evaluation

Abstract

User authentication is one of the most important topics in information security. A text-based strong password scheme can provide a certain degree of security. However, as strong passwords are difficult to memorize, users often write them down on a piece of paper or even save them in a computer file. An image-based authentication scheme has been proposed as a possible alternative solution to text-based authentication, motivated particularly by the fact that humans can remember images better than text. Recently, many networks, computer systems and electronic-commerce environments have tried using a graphical technique for user authentication. All graphical and image algorithms comprise two different aspects: usability and security. Unfortunately, none of the graphical algorithms are able to cover both these aspects at the same time. In this paper, we evaluate the usability and security of different authentication schemes and compare them with our proposed scheme, which is the Implicit Password Authentication System (IPAS) by an experiment and a questionnaire survey.