Choice-Based Authentication: A Usable-Security Approach

Authentication is an important security component of almost any software application. It serves as the application’s security front door by controlling access with the goal of protecting the confidentiality and integrity of the system. However, with the large variety of software applications that an end user interacts with daily, authentication is becoming a usability issue that has the potential to weaken a system’s overall security. The increasing complexity of dealing with a variety of authentication mechanisms often causes end users to develop negative security behaviours, such as writing down passwords. Moreover, some of the currently available authentication mechanisms, such as alphanumeric passwords, raise universal access issues due to both the issue of remembering a complex sequence of characters and the difficulty some individuals may have in entering that exact sequence on a keyboard or mobile device. This article proposes an authentication approach that seeks to address these usability, universal access, and security issues.