Cued Click-Point Memorability

Abstract: The Safety of passwords has been in question for over 40 years, long before the Internet. While improvements have been made to ensure security nothing has changed with passwords since the emergence of the Internet. Passwords need to be long and complex to be secure and users should not reuse their passwords. In a world where there are thousands of services on the internet requiring authentication to keep passwords safe users will have to remember a lot of passwords. Studies show however that users are prone to both create bad passwords but to also reuse their passwords on different sites. A lot of different alternatives to passwords has been proposed but none has become dominant. Is there a good alternative to text-based passwords? Can a graphical password be that alternative? The purpose of this thesis is to create a prototype of a CCP-like system and to conduct a memorability and usability test with it. The test results suggest that CCP is easy to use for users new to the concept of graphical passwords. A CCP-password also seems memorable with most participants recalling their passwords after a week with ease. PCCP can be a good substitute for passwords since it is easy to use, easy to remember and potentially more secure than text-based passwords.