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Use Your Illusion: secure authentication usable anywhere

Published: 23 July 2008 Publication History

Abstract

In this paper, we propose and evaluate Use Your Illusion, a novel mechanism for user authentication that is secure and usable regardless of the size of the device on which it is used. Our system relies on the human ability to recognize a degraded version of a previously seen image. We illustrate how distorted images can be used to maintain the usability of graphical password schemes while making them more resilient to social engineering or observation attacks. Because it is difficult to mentally "revert" a degraded image, without knowledge of the original image, our scheme provides a strong line of defense against impostor access, while preserving the desirable memorability properties of graphical password schemes.
Using low-fidelity tests to aid in the design, we implement prototypes of Use Your Illusion as i) an Ajax-based web service and ii) on Nokia N70 cellular phones. We conduct a between-subjects usability study of the cellular phone prototype with a total of 99 participants in two experiments. We demonstrate that, regardless of their age or gender, users are very skilled at recognizing degraded versions of self-chosen images, even on small displays and after time periods of one month. Our results indicate that graphical passwords with distorted images can achieve equivalent error rates to those using traditional images, but only when the original image is known.

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  • (2024)A systematic review of graphical password methods resistant to shoulder-surfing attacksInternational Journal of Information Security10.1007/s10207-024-00956-324:1Online publication date: 18-Dec-2024
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cover image ACM Other conferences
SOUPS '08: Proceedings of the 4th symposium on Usable privacy and security
July 2008
145 pages
ISBN:9781605582764
DOI:10.1145/1408664
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Association for Computing Machinery

New York, NY, United States

Publication History

Published: 23 July 2008

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Author Tags

  1. distortion
  2. graphical passwords
  3. social engineering

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  • Research-article

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SOUPS '08
SOUPS '08: The fourth Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security
July 23 - 25, 2008
Pennsylvania, Pittsburgh, USA

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Overall Acceptance Rate 15 of 49 submissions, 31%

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Cited By

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  • (2024)A3C: An Image-Association-Based Computing Device Authentication Framework for People with Upper Extremity ImpairmentsACM Transactions on Accessible Computing10.1145/365252217:2(1-37)Online publication date: 28-May-2024
  • (2024)Facetpass- Intelligent Facial Recognition Authentication System Security and Usability2024 2nd International Conference on Artificial Intelligence and Machine Learning Applications Theme: Healthcare and Internet of Things (AIMLA)10.1109/AIMLA59606.2024.10531549(1-6)Online publication date: 15-Mar-2024
  • (2024)A systematic review of graphical password methods resistant to shoulder-surfing attacksInternational Journal of Information Security10.1007/s10207-024-00956-324:1Online publication date: 18-Dec-2024
  • (2023)Graphical Password AuthenticationInternational Journal of Advanced Research in Science, Communication and Technology10.48175/IJARSCT-9250(541-551)Online publication date: 20-Apr-2023
  • (2023)GPOD: An Efficient and Secure Graphical Password Authentication System by Fast Object DetectionMultimedia Tools and Applications10.1007/s11042-023-17571-483:19(56569-56618)Online publication date: 12-Dec-2023
  • (2023)Framework for Multi-factor Authentication with Dynamically Generated PasswordsAdvances in Information and Communication10.1007/978-3-031-28073-3_39(563-576)Online publication date: 2-Mar-2023
  • (2022)An Image Encryption Scheme with the Associated Thumbnail2022 8th International Conference on Systems and Informatics (ICSAI)10.1109/ICSAI57119.2022.10005351(1-8)Online publication date: 10-Dec-2022
  • (2022)EYEDi: Graphical Authentication Scheme of Estimating Your Encodable Distorted Images to Prevent Screenshot AttacksIEEE Access10.1109/ACCESS.2021.313809310(2256-2268)Online publication date: 2022
  • (2022)PRA-TPEJournal of Visual Communication and Image Representation10.1016/j.jvcir.2022.10358987:COnline publication date: 1-Aug-2022
  • (2022)TIM: Secure and usable authentication for smartphonesJournal of Information Security and Applications10.1016/j.jisa.2022.10337471(103374)Online publication date: Dec-2022
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