New Textual Authentication Method to Resistant Shoulder-Surfing Attack

Using textual passwords suffer from the balance between security and usability. Password policies are usually adopted by system administrators to force users to choose strong passwords. However, users often use a simple password to make it easy to remember, which reduces the password strength and make it vulnerable to information security threats. When users enter their passwords in public places like airports or cafes, they become exposed to shoulder surfing attacks which are considered as a kind of social engineering. With a little effort, an attacker can capture a password by recording the individual’s authentication session or by direct observation. To overcome this vulnerability, we propose a new textual-password approach that uses camouflage characters and a virtual keyboard which leads to generating strong and easy to remember passwords. The perspective of usability and security was evaluated by experimental studies conducted with 65 users and then compared with recent studies. The results showed that the proposed technique has the lowest shoulder surfing success rate with just 3.63% with reasonable usability.