Desing, implementation, and usability evaluation of a novel knowledge-based authentication scheme supporting both desktops and mobile devices

In today's world, the number and opportunities of Internet access possibilities are rapidly increasing and developing. As a result of this situation, smart-phones and other mobile devices began to be commonly used in day-to-day life. Moreover, most of the online services want their users to authenticate themselves firstly. However, because of less friendly input methods, using traditional text-based passwords becomes even more tedious on these devices. To cope with these drawbacks on mobile devices and provide a scheme supporting both desktop and mobile devices, we propose a hybrid knowledge-based authentication scheme, gridWordX, which combines text and graphical elements. We conduct lab and web studies to compare usability of gridWordX with text-based passwords. The results show that gridWordX has significantly shorter login times on a mobile device and maintains comparable login times on a desktop machine.