GRAPHICAL PASSWORDS AND METHODS FOR ENHANCED PASSWORD MEMORABILITY

Obasan  Adebola¹, Abdulazeez Sikiru²,Patrick Owohunwa³

¹ Department of Computer Science, Kaduna Polytechnic,

^2&3 Department Mathematics, and Statistics, Kaduna, Kaduna State, Nigeria.

Email:  aolukay@yahoo.com, ysabdul94@yahoo.com, owohunwapatrick@yahoo.com

Abstract

Corporate organizations are depending on Internet-enabled Information Technology to reach their target users is a common practice today. This development has made huge users to employ the same technology to satisfy their diverse needs. Consequently, computer and information security has  become  a critical from  service provider viewpoint  to  achieve  protection, confidentiality, integrity, and ensure  reliable  access  to  information resource when  using  computer systems.  To achieve this, text-based password authentication has  been widely used without  flawlessness because remembering  secure  password chosen   from  mixture of  random  alphanumeric  and  non-alphanumeric   characters  is  an  everyday  problem  for  all  users because  of  individual memory  limitation. Graphical     password which  works  just  by  clicking  with  a  mouse  or  stylus  could  be  used for  user authentication. In this paper, we highlight needs for study of password, how memory influences passwords, different methods for improving memorability of passwords and memorability to achieve the main objective of the study.  Which is to design a graphical authentication system that uses three autobiographical events background images in draw-grid environment to reduce memory loads of password and to ultimately achieve better memorability and security of passwords. We also highlight memorability and  security features of  the proposed scheme.