A proposal of COMPASS (community portrait authentication system)

Recently, various types of personal authentication methods have been studied to confirm a persons\´ identity in the on-line system. However, the alphanumeric characters and authentication methods based on passwords and PINs (knowledge-factor authenticators) hold severe problems, and still must rely on the limitation of human\´s capacity of recollection. Recently, "graphical password", using visual information for authentication methods that utilize photographic image for authentication, has been proposed. However this method holds some problem on security. In this paper, we propose "COMPASS" (community portrait authentication system) that uses a portrait as the authentication image, to solve the issues of the previous graphical passwords. Moreover, COMPASS has the idea of the "community authentication" that a member of a certain community consisting of a party of human can be authenticated. The validity of the proposed method is confirmed by a set of subject experiments