PROPOSAL AND ITS EVALUATION OF A SHOULDER-SURFING ATTACK RESISTANT AUTHENTICATION METHOD:SECRET TAP WITH DOUBLE SHIFT

Recently, mobile terminals such as smartphones have come into widespread use. Most of such mobile terminals store several types of important data, such as personal information. Therefore, it is necessary to lock and unlock terminals using a personal authentication method such as personal identification numbers (PINs) in order to prevent data theft. However, most existing authentication methods have a common problem referred to here as a€ shoulder-surfinga€ , in which authentication information is covertly obtained by a person watching a€ over-the-shouldera€ of a user as he/she completes the authentication sequence. In the present paper, a new icon-based authentication method that is simple but sufficiently secure even when the authentication sequence is being watched is proposed. The proposed method is implemented on a mobile data terminal and is evaluated through experiments and questionnaire surveys.