A Comparative Study of Authentication Schemes with Security and Usability of IPAS

Abstract

User authentication is one of the most important topics in information security. Conventional user strong-password authentication schemes have the common drawback that user has to memorize a hard-to-remember textual password, and therefore their applications are restricted. As an alternative, token and biometric-based authentication systems were introduced. However, they have not improved substantially to justify the investment. Thus, 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. Click based graphical passwords that use background images do not have a sufficiently large password space suited for most Internet applications. Also, it suffered due to shoulder-surfing and replay attacks. All graphical and image algorithms comprise two different aspects: security and usability. Unfortunately, none of the graphical algorithms are able to cover both 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.