Novel Schemes for Authentication

Abstract

Authentication is one of the most basic process to provide security to any resource and application from unauthorized access. It covers two security goals confidentiality and integrity. Passwords are used as private identity for an individual. The password also has to be protected from several threats like stealing, shoulder surfing, eavesdropping and guessing. The most common method used for user Authentication is textual password using alphanumeric usernames and alphanumeric passwords. The issues which should be kept in mind while choosing a password is the how strong the password is and how good it is to memorize. Sometimes the stronger passwords are not easier to remember and easier passwords are not so secure. One more criteria for a good password, that should satisfy is, the password should be easy to type, such that any intruder, if any, is there beside you should not be able guess it or any camera behind you can’t capture the actual movements. To overcome the drawbacks of traditional textual schemes the new methods like graphical passwords are used. The easiness in remembering them and a strong resistance towards the brute force and dictionary attacks made them more popular. In this project, we have concentrated to protect our password from the above threats and to develop a system which has a strong resistant to above stated threats. We have implemented a varying password scheme which provides a better resistant to shoulder surfing, eavesdropping and guessing. This is an untraditional approach to use a not very complex and not very strong password in unsafe environments like public places. We have implemented the virtual keyboard and to make it more effective we are using multilingual keys. And also a hybrid system is designed by mixing three schemes: textual passwords, Recognition based passwords and Recall based password. All three are working together to remove the drawbacks of each scheme.