A Personalization Method Based on Human Factors for Improving Usability of User Authentication Tasks

Aiming to ensure safety of operation to application providers and improve the usability of human computer interactions during authentication, this paper proposes a two-step personalization approach of user authentication tasks based on individual differences in cognitive processing as follows: i) recommend a textual or graphical user authentication mechanism based on the users’ cognitive styles of processing textual and graphical information, and ii) recommend a standard or enhanced authentication key strength policy considering the users’ cognitive processing abilities. The proposed approach has been applied in a four month ecological valid user study in which 137 participants interacted with a personalized user authentication mechanism and policy based on their cognitive characteristics. Initial results indicate that personalizing the user authentication task based on human cognitive factors could provide a viable solution for balancing the security and usability of authentication mechanisms at the benefit of both application providers and end-users.