Comparison of Password Security and Memorability: Assessing the Usability of Traditional and Gamification Methods

Abstract

Textual passwords are the most common authentication mechanism due to their ease of use and implementation, as well as high memorability. As the computer processing power continued to increase, textual passwords gradually became less secure, resulting in an increased demand for longer, more secure, and harder to remember passwords. As a result, other authentication schemes, such as graphical passwords, have been explored. A recent study conducted by McLennan \textit{et. al} in 2017 introduced a new authentication scheme called Game Changer Password System (GCPS), which uses game figure positions as password characters. The usability of the scheme was evaluated as promising, but these conclusions suffered from validity threats, as the passwords used in the study did not represent secure GCPS passwords. In addition, the proposed scheme was not compared to the traditional passwords. In this study, we examined password recall rates and reaction time (login time), and we compared the results between the textual and GCPS passwords. We conclude that textual passwords are still superior both in terms of memorability and input speed, which justifies their prominence as a basic authentication mechanism.