Research On The Security Of Windows8Graphical Password Scheme

As a possible alternative to traditional alphanumeric passwords, graphical passwordhave caught increasing widespread attention and been seriously high-lighten inauthentication field for short decades since put forward. Microsoft has applied a kind ofgraphical password scheme in the new operating system, which is considered as the safestpassword scheme so far. In this paper, we make a thorough research and analysis on theWindows8graphical password scheme for security.As a new type of graphical password scheme, Windows8graphical passwordscheme may exist a variety of potential security problems. This paper makes a detailedintroduction of Windows8graphical password scheme’s application method togetherwith implementation principle and analyzes the potential security threats based on thesecurity problems faced by the existing graphical password schemes. Analysis resultsshow that Windows8graphical password scheme may face with security threats ofdictionary attack, shoulder surfing attack, social engineering attack, screen-scrapersattack, and smear attack. A series of experiments are made in this paper to achieve furtherstudy of hot-spots problem that may exist in Windows8graphical password scheme, aswell as user’s choice pattern and distribution characteristics of passwords. Experimentresults show that theoretical password space heterogeneity together with hot-spotsproblem does exist in Windows8graphical password scheme and users tend to choosesome prominent areas as their passwords. According to the conclusion, simulation attackexperiments of this scheme were done. The results of attack experiments show thatWindows8graphical password scheme cannot offer a practical defense against dictionaryattack, which proves further evidence of the existence of hot-spot problem in the scheme.