PICTURE PASSWORD: A SURROGATE TO PIN AUTHENTICATION SCHEME ON ANDROID PHONES

ABSTRACT

An authentication system on Android devices provides access control to the devices. It screens access to the devices. The security system makes it sufficiently difficult for an unauthorized person to gain access to computing resources. This work proposes an authentication scheme that could substitute Personal Identity Number (PIN) based on Passfaces technology. The scheme permits users to select pictures of their choice as their PIN. We have developed an Android app to simulate the scheme. Android Studio was used to create the user interface and Room database for the backend. Unlike the conventional PIN system where users are restricted to using a PIN of size 4, we evaluated our proposed scheme with 4, 5, 6, 7, and 8 pictures. A total of 412 users participated in the experiment. The scheme achieves a 91.29% effectiveness score, a time-based efficiency of 0.09 authentications s^-1, and overall relative efficiency of 66.84%. We found that a 4-picture password is the most usable with an efficiency score of 0.12 tasks s^-1

Keywords: authentication, efficiency metrics, effectiveness metrics, authentication attempt, setup creation, usability, PIN