FakePIN: Dummy key based mobile user authentication scheme

Abstract

Recently, smartphones have been used to store and manipulate a large amount of personal information. Hence, the importance of user authentication such as password setting has increased. Previous techniques to prevent a shoulder-surfing attack have considerable advantages with respect to security because they are mostly based on graphical features. They also have shortcomings in that the length of the password has to be memorized or that authentication takes a long time; hence, their usability is less than that of a text-based password technique. In this paper, we propose a dummy-key based password authentication scheme, called FakePIN, to assure good usability as well as to prevent shoulder-surfing, guessing, and smudge attacks. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2014.