Enhanced Knock Code Authentication with High Security and Improved Convenience

Abstract

Since smartphone contains various personal data, security is one of the important aspects in smartphone technologies. Up to now, various authentication techniques have been proposed to protect smartphones. The pattern lock on the Android system is one of the most widely used authentication methods for low-cost devices but it is known to be vulnerable to smudge attack or shoulder surfing attack. LG's smartphone uses its own technique, which is called "Knock Code." The knock code completes the authentication by touching the user defined area in turn on the screen. In this paper, we propose the new, enhanced version of knock code by adding the sliding operation and by using flexible area recognition. We conducted security analysis, which shows that under the same password size, the search space is overwhelmingly larger than the original algorithm. Also, by using the sliding operation, the proposed scheme shows resilience against smudge attacks. We implemented the prototype of our scheme. Experimental results show that compared with the original Knock Code and Android pattern lock, our scheme is more convenient while providing better security.