Evaluation of an Enhanced Dynamic Knowledge-Based Authentication System (EDKBA) in the Era of Social Media

Services related to information and communication technology (ICT) today require secure personal identity verification methods to guard against unauthorized access. There are several authentication methods, with traditional passwords being the most popular one. Passwords are susceptible to threats like eavesdropping and forgotten passwords, though. One of the finest substitutes for conventional passwords was knowledge-based authentication (KBA), which verifies identification using public records. Static and dynamic KBAs are examples of KBAs that are vulnerable to theft and modification. The goal of the study was to develop and implement an enhanced DKBA (EDKBA) system that uses challenge response questions and answers to authenticate users in real time. Two attack models, naive attack (guessing) and strategic attack (brute force), were used to evaluate the effectiveness of the EDKBA system. The developed EDKBA provided improved security by dynamically generating authentication questions based on real-time information about users' weekly Facebook activities. The EDKBA experiment showed a success rate and True Positive of 72.57% with an acceptable error rate (False Negative) of 27.43%. The study concluded that implementing EDKBA will reduce the rising risks brought on by unauthorized access to data and cybercrime, which would directly improve the overall security of sensitive data and information.