Graphical passwords: drawing a secret with rotation as a new degree of freedom
Saikat Chakrabarti, George V. Landon, Mukesh Kumar Singhal · 2007
Psychological studies have shown a substantial improvement of performance in remembering (recalling and recognizing) pictorial representations of materials over verbal ones. The motivation behind exploring a graphical password scheme was based on the remarkable ability of humans to recall pictures. In this paper, we present a novel, user-friendly, recall-based graphical password scheme, R-DAS, where the user is allowed to rotate the canvas on which he draws the password. We perform an analysis that shows that rotation, as an added degree of freedom, not only increases the full graphical password space, but more importantly increases the predictable graphical password space corresponding to the number of components (strokes). With the visually obvious technique of rotation, R-DAS provides greater security than existing schemes built using the “Draw-A-Secret ” scheme without compromising user convenience. KEY WORDS Authentication, graphical passwords, recall-based passwords, DAS, graphical password space. 1