Divide and Conquer Approach for Solving Security and Usability Conflict in User Authentication

Knowledge based authentication schemes are divided into textual password schemes and graphical password schemes. Textual password schemes are easy to use but have well known security issues, such as weak against online security attacks. Graphical password schemes are generally weak against shoulder surfing attacks. Usability is another issue with most of the graphical password schemes. For improving security of knowledge-based authentication schemes complex password entry procedures are used, which improve security but weakens useability of the authentication schemes. In order to resolve this security and usability conflict, a user authentication scheme is proposed, which contains one registration and two login screens called easy and secure login screens. Easy login screen provides easy and quick way of authentication while secure login screen is resilient to different online security attacks. A user has to decide based upon the authentication environment, which login screen to be used for authentication. For secure environment, where chances of security attacks are less easy login screen is recommended. For insecure environments where chances of security attacks are high, secure login screen is recommended for authentication. In the proposed scheme, image based passwords can also be set along with alphanumeric passwords. Results suggest that proposed scheme improves security against offline and online attacks.

@article{Nizamani2018,
  title     = {Divide and Conquer Approach for Solving Security and Usability Conflict in User Authentication},
  journal   = {International Journal of Advanced Computer Science and Applications},
  volume    = {9},
  number    = {5},
  year      = {2018},
  publisher = {The Science and Information Organization},
  author    = {Shah Zaman Nizamani and Waqas Ali Sahito and Shafique Awan},
  doi       = {10.14569/IJACSA.2018.090564},
  url       = {https://doi.org/10.14569/IJACSA.2018.090564}
}