Authentication Using Session Based Passwords

A very severe issue in today's computing world is the 'ACCESS' to an authenticated user. The most common and popular authentication mechanism is to use alphanumerical usemames and passwords including special characters and digits. But, textual passwords are most of the time prone to dictionary attacks, shoulder surfing, etc. Hence, graphical passwords have been introduced in this paper as an alternative to authentication schemes. Though the graphical password schemes help in generating more user friendly passwords, they are still vulnerable to shoulder surfing. To address this issue, text along with images can be combined to generate more secured passwords. Session passwords, as the name suggests can only be entered once and then, a new password is generated for the next session; thereby making the authentication process much stronger. (C) 2015 Published by Elsevier B.V.