Author : Nilesh Kawale and Shubhangi Patil

The most important thing in the network security is to provide user authentication. Therefore passwords are used in the vast majority of computers and communication systems for authentication. Passwords may be of two types, text based password and Graphical password. Using Text Based strong passwords, provides good security but memorizing text based password is so difficult. In such case, users have to write it on piece of paper or have to save inside computer. This paper provides an alternative solution to text based password authentication which is Graphical Password. Graphical password approach is also known as Graphical Password Authentication (GUA). Graphical password is much easier and simple to remember than text based password. This type of interface provides better way to remember images better. However, issue with GUA is shoulder surfing attack which can capture users mouse clicks. In this paper, we will propose to reduce the shoulder surfing attack up to certain extend with the random character set generation for each image using the concept of watermarking.

Keywords: Graphical Password, Shoulder Surfing, Authentication Security, Alphanumeric Password.

Article published in International Journal of Current  Engineering  and Technology, Vol.4,No.2 (April- 2014)