A Camouflage Text-Based Password Approach for Mobile Devices against Shoulder-Surfing Attack

Abstract

Authentication in mobile devices is inherently vulnerable to attacks and has the weakness of being susceptible to shoulder-surfing attack. Shoulder-surfing attack is a type of attack that uses direct observation techniques such as looking over someone’s shoulder to get information. This paper aims to introduce a novel way of concealing the password within a contingent of randomly selected entries. In particular, the traditional password concept where what you input is what you get is redefined by proposing the camouflage characters approach. Based on this approach, three defensive techniques are introduced for mobile devices. By using an Android platform, the introduced techniques are implemented. Experimental studies are conducted in order to evaluate both security and usability perspectives. The empirical results showed that the proposed approach is reasonably resistant against shoulder-surfing attacks and usable for participants. Moreover, it is possible to choose very short passwords, while insuring that the password remains hidden amongst a large number of key presses. Based on the achieved results, the proposed approach is recommended to be a new avenue in the field of security to produce very simple and yet very complicated passwords, to be observed by the attacker, at the same time.