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Picture Gesture Authentication: Empirical Analysis, Automated Attacks, and Scheme Evaluation

Published: 13 April 2015 Publication History

Abstract

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™ 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 more than 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.

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  1. Picture Gesture Authentication: Empirical Analysis, Automated Attacks, and Scheme Evaluation

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    Published In

    cover image ACM Transactions on Information and System Security
    ACM Transactions on Information and System Security  Volume 17, Issue 4
    April 2015
    127 pages
    ISSN:1094-9224
    EISSN:1557-7406
    DOI:10.1145/2756875
    • Editor:
    • Gene Tsudik
    Issue’s Table of Contents
    Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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    Publication History

    Published: 13 April 2015
    Accepted: 01 December 2014
    Revised: 01 November 2014
    Received: 01 February 2014
    Published in TISSEC Volume 17, Issue 4

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    Author Tags

    1. Picture gesture authentication
    2. automated attacks
    3. empirical analysis
    4. scheme evaluation

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    • Global Research Laboratory Project through the National Research Foundation (NRF-2014K1A1A2043029)

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    • (2023)Security and Usability of a Personalized User Authentication Paradigm: Insights from a Longitudinal Study with Three Healthcare OrganizationsACM Transactions on Computing for Healthcare10.1145/35646104:1(1-40)Online publication date: 27-Feb-2023
    • (2023)BackLip: Passphrase-Independent Lip-reading User Authentication with Backscatter Signals2023 IEEE/ACM 31st International Symposium on Quality of Service (IWQoS)10.1109/IWQoS57198.2023.10188767(1-10)Online publication date: 19-Jun-2023
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