Secure Authentication Mechanism for Resistance to Password Attacks

Abstract

Authentication is a process that provides access control of any type of computing applications by inspecting the user’s identification with the database of authorized users. Passwords play the vital role in authentication mechanism to ensure the privacy of the information and avert from the illicit access. Password based authentication mechanism suffers from many password attacks such as shoulder surfing, brute forcing and dictionary attacks that crack the password of authentication schema by the adversary. Key Stroke technique, Click Pattern technique, Graphichical Password technique and Authentication panel are the several authentication techniques used to resist the password attacks in the literature. This research study critically reviews the types of password attacks and proposes a matrix based secure authentication mechanism which includes three phases namely, User generation phase, Matrix generation phase and Authentication phase to resist the existing password attacks. The performance measure of the proposed method investigates the results in terms existing password attacks and shows the good resistance to password attacks in any type of computing applications.