Towards the design of a film-based graphical password scheme

Password-based authentication schemes and their graphical evolutions have been deeply analyzed in the last couple of decades. Typically such schemes are not resilient to shoulder surfing attacks, that is, if the adversary can observe (and “understand”) a number of authentication sessions, he can identify the secret password. In this paper we propose a new paradigm for user authentication. FilmPW is a graphical authentication system where the system challenges the user by showing her a short film containing a number of pre-defined pass-events and the user has reply by proving she recognized such events. We present FilmPW, discuss some issues related to event classification and present a prototye implementation. Our preliminary experiments show that such an authentication mechanism is highly accepted by users and achieves low error rates.