A survey on usability and security features in graphical user authentication algorithms

Nowadays, user authentication is one of the important topics in information security. Text-based strong password scheme can provide security to a certain degree. However, the fact that strong passwords being difficult to memorize often leads their owners to write them down on papers or even save them in a computer file. Graphical authentication has been proposed as a possible alternative solution to text-based authentication, motivated particularly by the fact that humans can remember images better than text. Recently, many networks, computer system and Internet-based environments try using graphical authentication techniques as their user’s authentication. Graphical passwords have two essential aspects, usability and security. Unfortunately till now none of the proposed algorithms were able to cover both of them simultaneously. This paper presents a review on the security and usability features of graphical password authentication schemes. In this study we surveyed 23 papers and explained the problems, solutions, findings and future work recommended in each paper. In the next paper we will cover a new model supporting security and usability together.