A Secure Gesture Based Authentication Scheme to Unlock the Smartphones

In the recent times, the smart phones have become versatile that they are used for sensitive applications such as m-banking, m-commerce, m-governance, m-health, digital marketing, SMS and have become a vital gadget to share posts in social networking applications such as Facebook, Twitter, WhatsApp and others. It is also used for online gaming, surfing, chatting and also used for storing the personal information like photos, videos, documents and other important files. In this scenario, it is no surprise that the basic demand for utilizing a smart phone is secure authentication. Though a number of authentication schemes have been proposed in the literature through PIN numbers, passwords and patterns, they are susceptible for shoulder surfing or smudging attacks. Thus, combing gestures with such authentication schemes prove to be more successful in the present times and hence a new kind of pattern has been proposed with essential gestures such as finger pressure and inclination of the phone while it is being unlocked. This work is different from the previous works in two dimensions. First, the proposed pattern is secure against both shoulder surfing and smudging attacks. Second, the computational complexity of authentication scheme has been reduced. Through extensive experiments it can be proved that this work outperforms many works in the recent literature and hence it would be an ideal candidate for the secure authentication of smart phones.