Do You See What I See?: The Use of Visual Passwords for Authentication

Abstract

A password is one of the oldest forms of authentication whose popularity has not waned. Passwords are easy to use, inexpensive to deploy, and are familiar by everyone. However, this comes with a cost. Passwords are easy to guess, difficult to remember when they are made complex and unique, and found everywhere on the Dark Web. The security usability paradox suggests that any improvements in security will result in a decrease in usability, and vice versa. In this paper, we examine the feasibility of a visual password system in which a traditional password is used, but with the additional capability of modifying the characters of the password to provide significantly higher levels of entropy.