CogniPGA: Longitudinal Evaluation of Picture Gesture Authentication with Cognition-Based Intervention

Abstract

There is evidence that the visual behavior of users when creating graphical passwords affects the password strength. Adopting a cognitive style perspective in the interpretation of the results of recent studies revealed that users, depending on their cognitive style, follow different visual exploration paths when creating graphical passwords which affected the password strength. To take advantage of the inherent abilities of people, we proposed CogniPGA, a cued-recall graphical authentication scheme where a cognition-based intervention using gaze data is applied. This paper presents the longitudinal evaluation of the proposed scheme in terms of security, memorability, and usability from a cognitive style perspective. Results strengthen the assumptions that understanding and using the inherent cognitive characteristics of users could enable the design of user-first authentication schemes, where no compromises need to be made on security for benefiting usability or the other way around.