A Secure Hybrid Authentication Scheme Using Passpoints and Press Touch Code

With the increasing capabilities of smart devices, keeping them secure has become a major concern. To mitigate that concern, over the last few years, several new classes of authentication schemes have been proposed. Graphical Authentication (GA) is one of those classes and is the focus of this paper. The GA schemes are more popular and preferable for smart devices due to their: heavily graphics-oriented nature, higher memorability over text-based schemes, and no additional hardware requirement. However, most of these GA schemes are unable to resist several prominent attacks, namely shoulder surfing, smudge, and brute force. Therefore, in this paper, a new hybrid authentication scheme is proposed which seamlessly integrates two independent yet popular authentication schemes - Passpoints and Press Touch Code or PTC. The purpose of this new scheme is to ensure a higher level of security by resisting those prominent attacks. The proposed scheme is implemented on the Android operating system and is tested on Huawei P9 plus device, a pressure sensitivity screen enabled device, which is compulsory for the PTC scheme. The performance of the proposed technique is evaluated for security, functionality, and usability. When it is compared with other similar schemes, it outperforms the existing schemes.