Disabilities and Authentication Methods: Usability and Security

Social media and services available in the Internet should be accessible for all. However, information within the services and media needs to be protected, so that only a specific user or group of users have access to their own private information. Authentication is a visible element of information protection and its essence is that users prove that they are who they claim to be. For most of us, this is an almost unnoticeable routine before actually using the service. However, there are many legitimate users who find this task difficult or impossible, such as those with disabilities. In this paper, we focus on people with Parkinson's disease, dyslexia, vision impairment and upper extremity disabilities. We show how these disabilities affect the security level and usability of current authentication methods, namely static PIN codes, textual passwords, one-time codes generated either by a code generator or received via SMS.