A Gamified Approach to Improve Users' Memorability of Fall-back Authentication
This addresses usability issues in fall-back authentication for users who forget passwords, but it is incremental as it adapts an existing game design to a specific security context.
The paper tackles the problem of poor memorability in fall-back authentication security questions by proposing a gamified approach based on a picture-based mobile game, resulting in a design that incorporates graphical, verbal, spatial, and interactive cues to enhance long-term memory encoding.
Security questions are one of the techniques used in fall-back authentication to retrieve forgotten passwords. This paper proposes a game design which aims to improve usability of system-generated security questions. In our game design, we adapted the popular picture-based "4 Pics 1 word" mobile game. This game asks users to pick the word that relates the given pictures. We selected this game because of its use of pictures and cues, in which, psychology research has found to be important to help with memorability. The proposed game design focuses on encoding information to users' long- term memory and to aide memorability by using the follow- ing memory retrieval skills: (a) graphical cues - by using images in each challenge; (b) verbal cues - by using verbal descriptions as hints; (c) spatial cues - by keeping same or- der of pictures; (d) interactivity - engaging nature of the game through the use of persuasive technology principles.