Secure pattern-key based password authentication scheme
Mehfooz Zaki, Adil Husain, M. Sarosh Umar, Muneeb Hasan Khan · 2017
Text-based password authentication scheme is vulnerable to many attacks such as shoulder surfing attack and similar kind of attacks like dictionary attack, brute-force attack etc. Many graphic based password authentication schemes are there but they are also quite expensive in deployment and needs more response time at login phase. In this paper, a more secure pattern-key based password authentication scheme is proposed which provides more security using combination of pattern, key, and dummy digits. For this, user needs to recognize and register pattern in the form of location numbers from grid, register key values that maps values to password and add dummy values to password so as to misguide the attacker. After that, to login, user needs to recall the pattern and maps the textual password from pattern with registered key values, creating a password by adding dummy digits. It minimizes the shoulder surfing, brute-force attacks etc due to high complexity of guessing password in multi-levels: first from pattern, then from key and then from dummy values. This scheme is resistant to usability issues such that it does not overload human memory and provides extra security against anonymous attackers.