Smartphones store a significant amount of personal and private information, and are playing an increasingly important role in people's lives. It is important for authentication techniques to be more resistant against two known attacks called shoulder surfing and smudge attacks. In this work, we propose a new technique called 3D Pattern. Our 3D Pattern technique takes advantage of a new input paradigm called pre-touch, which could soon allow smartphones to sense a user's finger position at some distance from the screen. We implement the technique and evaluate it in a pilot study (n=6) by comparing it to PIN and pattern locks. Our results show that although our prototype takes about 8 seconds to authenticate, it is immune to smudge attacks and promises to be more resistant to shoulder surfing.
Now that smartphones are commonplace, traditional authentication techniques have been adapted to work on the small touchscreens of smartphones. @cite_25 compared speed and shoulder-surfing resistance of a scrambled PIN entry keypad and a normal PIN entry keypad. They found that the scrambled keypad was slower but more resistant to shoulder surfing.
@cite_25
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PIN unlock is a popular screen locking mechanism used for protecting the sensitive private information on smart-phones. However, it is susceptible to a number of attacks such as guessing attacks, shoulder surfing attacks, smudge attacks, and side-channel attacks. Scramble keypad changes the keypad layout in each PIN-entry process to improve the security of PIN unlock. In this paper, the security and usability of scramble keypad for PIN unlock are studied. Our security analysis shows that scramble keypad can defend smudge attacks perfectly and greatly reduce the threats of side-channel attacks. A user study is conducted to demonstrate that scramble keypad has a better chance to defend shoulder surfing attacks than standard keypad. We also investigate how the usability of scramble keypad is compromised for improved security through a user study.