Authenticating Users by Word Association
Sidney L. Smith · Proceedings of the Human Factors and Ergonomics Society Annual Meeting · 1987
Testing word associations, as an extension of simple password entry, may be a practical means of verifying the identity of individual computer users. If each user specifies his/her own cue-response associations, then responses will be easy to remember. It should be easy for legitimate users to respond correctly to word association testing, but virtually impossible for potential intruders. Such testing should also prove easy for a computer to process.