Enhancing User Authentication with a Secure Human-Computable Password Scheme

Authentication in the digital world has become a challenging and difficult task. The username-password combination is no longer reliable and the tools that support authentication mechanism are all breakable. In addition to authentication, to avoid bots, CAPTCHA is used which increases the complexity of the system. Thus the research is going towards making use of human brain which is so unique and powerful in the authentication process. This will also eliminate the need for CAPTCHA since human is computing the password. To make it feasible, the function that is computed by the human should be simple enough. The existing method trusts the computer to store the public images and if there is a key logger installed in the system, the adversary will be able to get the password. This again tends to be a fixed password. Instead, if it is based on a challenge from the server, the password will be dynamic and secure. In this paper a human computable password protocol is suggested. The experimental results prove that the proposed technique is efficient and is less prone to attacks.