Photographic Authentication through Untrusted Terminals

  • Authors:
  • Trevor Pering;Murali Sundar;John Light;Roy Want

  • Affiliations:
  • -;-;-;-

  • Venue:
  • IEEE Pervasive Computing
  • Year:
  • 2003

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Abstract

Photographic authentication is a technique for logging into untrusted public Internet access terminals. It leverages a person's ability to recognize personal photographs by asking users to identify their own personal photographs from a set of randomized images. By changing the specific images shown on each login attempt, this technique is resilient to replay attacks, which are when an "overheard" login sequence is replayed verbatim to unscrupulously gain access to a system. A prototype implementation and corresponding user-tests show that not only are participants extremely adept at quickly and accurately recognizing their own photographs, but attackers can't reliably determine which photographs are "correct" even when given samples of a user's photographs.