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Article
Exploring the Potential of GeoPass: A Geographic Location-Password Scheme
Interacting with Computers
  • Mahdi Nasrullah Al-Ameen, Utah State University
  • Matthew Wright, University of Texas at Arlington
Document Type
Article
Publisher
OUP
Publication Date
11-14-2016
Abstract

Password schemes based on online map locations are an emerging topic in authentication research. GeoPass is a promising such scheme, as it provides satisfactory resilience against online guessing and showed high memorability (97%) in a single-password laboratory study. In this article, we investigate more deeply into the potential of GeoPass through four separate studies. First, in a 2-month-long field study, we found that users in a real-world setting remembered their location passwords 96.1% of the time and showed improvement with more login sessions. Then, in a study of interference effects in Geopass, in which each participant had to remember four separate location passwords, we found that memorability was 97%, with only 3.4% of login attempts failing due to interference. We also conducted a shoulder-surfing study to examine the resilience of GeoPass against this attack. Based on our results, we identify the promising aspects of location passwords that should be further studied in future research.

Citation Information
Mahdi Nasrullah Al-Ameen and Matthew Wright. Exploring the Potential of GeoPass: A Geographic Location-Password Scheme. In Interacting with Computers. November, 2016.