Usable Authentication Mechanisms for Mobile Devices: An Exploration of 3D Graphical Passwords

Current authentication systems in mobile devices such as smart phones have many shortcomings. Users tend to use simple textual passwords such as PINs, which are easily cracked by intruders. Meanwhile, graphical passwords suffer from shoulder surfing attack. In this paper, a new authentication system using 3D graphical passwords, will be proposed and tested to offer more security for mobile devices. This authentication system allows users to interact with the 3D objects in a 3D virtual environment and these actions are tracked in the virtual environment and used to create unique passwords. Based on the previous studies of the 3D password scheme, this paper developed a simple testing program that enables users to create their own 3D password easily. At the end of the paper, some improvements of the program and this authentication system are discussed.