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Florian Alt, Mateusz Mikusz, Stefan Schneegass, Andreas Bulling
Memorability of Cued-Recall Graphical Passwords with Saliency Masks
In MUM '16: Proceedings of the 15th International Conference on Mobile and Ubiquitous Multimedia (bib)

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 pass- words. Saliency masks were shown to significantly improve password security by excluding those areas of the image that are most likely to lead to hotspots. In this paper we investi- gate the impact of such saliency masks on the memorability of cued-recall graphical passwords. We first conduct two pre- studies (N=52) to obtain a set of images with three different image complexities as well as real passwords. A month-long user study (N=26) revealed that there is a strong learning ef- fect for graphical passwords, in particular if defined on images with a saliency mask. While for complex images, the learning curve is steeper than for less complex ones, they best sup- ported memorability in the long term, most likely because they provided users more alternatives to select memorable password points. 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.