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The usage of alphanumerical usernames and passwords has been the regular practice for authentication purposes. However, with changing demands for security this method has shown significant drawbacks. For example, users tend to pick passwords that can be easily guessed. On the other hand, if a password is hard to guess, then it is often hard to remember. To address this issue, we can use an alternate authentication method that uses pictures as passwords. Graphical password has been proposed as a possible alternative to text-based schemes, motivated partially by the fact that humans can remember pictures better than text; psychological studies supports such assumption. Pictures are generally easier to remember in comparison to text. In addition, if the number of possible pictures is sufficiently large, the possible password space of a graphical password scheme may exceed that of text-based schemes and thus presumably offer better resistance to dictionary attacks. Because of these advantages, there is a growing interest in graphical password. In addition to workstation and web log-in applications, graphical passwords have also been applied to ATM machines and mobile devices.
About the author
Debi Prasad Mishra is currently working in Department of Information Technology, College of Engineering and Technology, Bhubaneswar. He has done B.Tech in Information Technology and M. Tech in Computer Science & Engineering with Specialization in Information Security. His research interests are Network Security, Data Retrieval, Computer Networks.
