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User authentication in the online environment is promoting a hugely challenging issue. This has contributed to the realization of a user authentication where the exams can be performed over the Internet at any time and from any place and by using any digital device. Consequently, further investigations are required to focus on improving user authentication methods to enhance online security mechanisms, especially in the field of e-exams. This research proposes a new user authentication technique based on the user interface (UI). The novel idea is created based on the design preferences of candidates who are taking the e-exams. Several design features are used to design a special user interface for e-exams, for example, the font attributes, back colour, number of questions per page, group categories for questions based on difficulties, and timer setting. The introduced technique can be used to support the user authentication process in the e-exams environment. Furthermore, the proposed technique provides the ability to login to the e-exam without the need to remember the login information, but to select what the student prefers according to his/her personal information. Based on the literature review, a primary evaluation claiming that the students have differences in their preferences and that each user has stable design preferences within different sessions is revealed. In regard to these facts, they become the resource and essence of this research. The security performance of the proposed method is evaluated. The results of the experiments show a false positive (FP) rate of 0.416% and a false negative (FN) rate of 0%.

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User authentication is a very important online environment issue. More researches are needed to focus on enhancing user authentication methods for online examination. This paper is a review of online authentication methods for online examination and propose a novel authentication method called "Preferences Based Authentication" PrBA. The proposed method based on the exam taker design preferences chosen for online exams. A lot of design features could be applied to the exam interface, such as font (size, face, and style, colour), background colour, the number of questions per page, group question by (Type, difficulty) and timer type. These preferences have a close relationship with user characteristics, whether physical (vision, hearing, etc.), cognitive (memory, etc.), psychomotor (attention, focus, etc.), demographics (age, gender, etc.) or experiences (professional skills). The PrBA proposed in this paper could be used as an alternative to resolve the problem of user authentication within online exams.