Usable Security


Current authentication systems strive to be as secure as possible. This poses several challenges to the user such as remembering complex alphanumerical passwords or changing the password every other month. Since average users currently need to remember many different passwords, making them secure against brute force attacks (i.e., making them long and complex) does not scale well anymore. This results in users writing down their passwords or using pattern on the keyboard as passwords. To tackle this issue, we developed different systems that authenticate users without forcing them to remember complex passwords.

 

Implicit Authentication using Wearable Devices

ImplicitAuthenticationSecure user identification is important for the increasing number of eyewear computers but limited input capabilities pose significant usability challenges for established knowledge-based schemes, such as a passwords or PINs. We present SkullConduct, a biometric system that uses bone conduction of sound through the user’s skull as well as a microphone readily integrated into many of these devices, such as Google Glass. At the core of SkullConduct is a method to analyze the characteristic frequency response created by the user’s skull using a combination of Mel Frequency Cepstral Coefficient (MFCC) features as well as a computationally light-weight 1NN classifier. We report on a controlled experiment with 10 participants that shows that this frequency response is person-specific and stable — even when taking off and putting on the device multiple times — and thus serves as a robust biometric. We show that our method can identify users with 97.0% accuracy and authenticate them with an equal error rate of 6.9%, thereby bringing biometric user identification to eyewear computers equipped with bone conduction technology.

 

smudgesafeA Novel Mobile Authentication Method

Touch-enabled user interfaces have become ubiquitous on portable devices. At the same time, authentication using touch input is problematic, since finger smudge traces may allow attackers to reconstruct passwords. We present SmudgeSafe, an authentication system that uses random geometric image transformations, such as translation, rotation, scaling, shearing, and flipping, to increase the security of cued-recall graphical passwords. We describe the design space of these transformations and report on two user studies: A lab-based security study involving 20 participants in attacking user-defined passwords, using high quality pictures of real smudge traces captured on a mobile phone display; and an in-the-field usability study with 374 participants who generated more than 130,000 logins on a mobile phone implementation of SmudgeSafe. Results show that SmudgeSafe significantly increases security compared to authentication schemes based on PINs and lock patterns, and exhibits very high learnability, efficiency, and memorability.

 

 

 

Exploring User Behavior in the Wild

smudgewildCommon user authentication methods on smartphones, such as lock patterns, PINs, or passwords, impose a trade-off between security and password memorability. Image-based passwords were proposed as a secure and usable alternative. As of today, however, it remains unclear how such schemes are used in the wild. We present the first study to investigate how image-based passwords are used over long periods of time in the real world. Our analyses are based on data from 2318 unique devices collected over more than one year using a custom application released in the Android Play store. We present an in-depth analysis of what kind of images users select, how they define their passwords, and how secure these passwords are. Our findings provide valuable insights into real-world use of image-based passwords and inform the design of future graphical authentication schemes.

Publications

Stefan Schneegass, Youssef Oualil, and Andreas Bulling. 2016. SkullConduct: Biometric User Identification on Eyewear Computers Using Bone Conduction Through the Skull. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems (to be published), ACM.

Stefan Schneegass, Frank Steimle, Andreas Bulling, Florian Alt, and Albrecht Schmidt. 2014. SmudgeSafe: Geometric Image Transformations for Smudge-resistant User Authentication. Proceedings of the 2014 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing, ACM, 775–786. http://doi.org/10.1145/2632048.2636090

Florian Alt, Stefan Schneegass, Alireza Sahami Shirazi, Mariam Hassib, and Andreas Bulling. 2015. Graphical Passwords in the Wild: Understanding How Users Choose Pictures and Passwords in Image-based Authentication Schemes. In Proceedings of the 17th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction with Mobile Devices and Services (MobileHCI ’15). ACM, New York, NY, USA, 316-322. http://dx.doi.org/10.1145/2785830.2785882