TQ-Model: A new evaluation model for knowledge-based authentication schemes

Many user authentication schemes are developed to resolve security issues of traditional textual password scheme. However, only Android unlock scheme gets wide acceptance among users in the domain of smartphones. Although Android unlock scheme has many security issues, it is widely used due to usability advantages. Different models and frameworks are developed for evaluating the performance of user authentication schemes. However, most of the existing frameworks provide ambiguous process of evaluation, and their results do not reflect how much an authentication scheme is strong or weak with respect to traditional textual password scheme. In this research paper, an evaluation model called textual passwords-based quantification model (TQ-Model) is proposed for knowledge-based authentication schemes. In the TQ-Model, evaluation is done on the basis of different features, which are related to security, usability and memorability. An evaluator needs to assign a score to each of the feature based on some criteria defined in the model. From the evaluation result, the performance difference between a knowledge-based authentication scheme and textual password scheme can be measured. Furthermore, evaluation results of Android unlock scheme, picture gesture authentication scheme and Passface scheme are presented in the paper using the TQ-Model.