Age-related performance issues for PIN and face-based authentication systems

Abstract

Graphical authentication systems typically claim to be more usable than PIN or password-based systems, but these claims often follow limited, single-stage paradigm testing on a young, student population. We present a more demanding test paradigm in which multiple codes are learned and tested over a three-week period. We use this paradigm with two user populations, comparing the performance of younger and older adults. We first establish baseline performance in a study in which populations of younger and older adults learn PIN codes and we follow this with a second study in which younger and older adults use two face-based graphical authentication systems employing young faces vs. old faces as code components.As expected, older adults show relatively poor performance when compared to younger adults, irrespective of the authentication material, but this age-related deficit can be markedly reduced by the introduction of age-appropriate faces. We conclude firstly that this paradigm provides a good basis for the future evaluation of memory-based authentication systems and secondly that age-appropriate face-based authentication is viable in the security marketplace.

Towards Making Random Passwords Memorable

“…Note that the one-week delay is larger than the maximum average interval for a user between her subsequent logins to any of her important accounts [23]. One week is also a common interval used in authentication studies (e.g., [17,30,49]). Session 1.…”

Multi-Factor Authentication: A Survey

“…The authors of [153] provided a study on how the user age affects the task efficiency in cases of PIN and graphic access mechanisms. It is concluded that younger generation can spend up to 50 percent less time to pass the authentication procedure in both cases.…”

Pay or delay

“…The challenge here is subtler than keeping data and information safe through more secure and usable authentication mechanisms (as in [8,21]). The issues here relate more to data sharing and access control in the home (e.g.…”

“…That digital technology is so crucial to our interactions with money has not gone unnoticed by the HCI community. In recent years there has been studies of alternative authentication systems to access our finances [23], the adoption of new banking systems in diverse cultural settings [20,25] and work focusing on groups excluded from accessing new banking technologies and services [21,27,28]. However, thus far no work in HCI has examined the specific needs of people who live on incomes that are drastically lower than the majority of the population for whom banking services are generally designed for.…”