Improved Visual Preference Authentication

We describe an improved preference-based password reset scheme in which both security and usability of previous approaches are dramatically improved on. We report on experimental findings supporting these claims. Our experiment shows a false negative rate on the order of 0.9% and a false positive rate on the order of 0.5% for a choice of parameters that result in a registration time of 100 seconds and an authentication time of 40 seconds. The improvements are due to a tertiary classification during authentication, instead of a binary classification, which allows a reduction in the number it items to be classified. Preference-based authentication schemes offer higher retention rates and lower risks for data-mining based attacks than comparable knowledge-based authentication schemes.