Memorability of Cued-Recall Graphical Passwords with Saliency Masks

Florian Alt, Mateusz Mikusz, Stefan Schneegass, Andreas Bulling

Proc. International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (MUM), pp. 191-200, 2016.

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Abstract

Cued-recall graphical passwords have a lot of potential for secure user authentication, particularly if combined with saliency masks to prevent users from selecting weak passwords. Saliency masks exclude those areas of the image that are most likely to lead to hotspots and were shown to significantly improve password security. In this paper we investigate the impact of such saliency masks on the memorability of cued-recall graphical passwords. We first conduct two pre-studies with 52 participants to obtain a set of images with three different image complexities as well as real passwords. Based on a month-long user study with 26 participants we then show that cued-recall graphical passwords defined on a single image with a saliency mask are not more difficult to remember than those without saliency mask, and that the complexity of the password images does not have any influence on password memorability. These results complement prior work on the security of such passwords and underline the potential of saliency masks as both a secure and usable improvement to cued-recall gaze-based graphical passwords.

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