On-line Gesture Based User Authentication System Robust to Shoulder Surfing

People often prefer to preserve a lot of confidential information in different electronic devices such as laptops, desktops, tablets, etc. Access to these personalized devices are managed through well known and robust user authentication techniques. Therefore, designing authentication methodologies using various input modalities received much attention of the researchers of this domain. Since we access such personalized devices everywhere including crowded places such as offices, public places, meeting halls, etc., the risk of an imposter gaining one’s identification information becomes highly feasible. One of the oldest but effective form of identity theft by observation is known as shoulder surfing. Patterns drawn by the authentic user on tablet surfaces or keys typed through keyboard can easily be recognized through shoulder surfing. Contact-less user interface devices such as Leap Motion controller can be used to mitigate some of the limitations of existing contact-based input methodologies. In this paper, we propose a robust user authentication technique that has been designed to counter the chances of getting one’s identity stolen by shoulder surfing. Our results reveal that, the proposed methodology can be quite effective to design robust user authentication systems, especially for personalized electronic devices.