PassBeat
PassBeat offers an intuitive and more natural authentication experience by using rhythms instead of letters and numbers.
PassBeat is a rhythm-based authentication method for a music streaming app. It was developed as a research tool to answer research questions on the retentiveness rhythm-based passwords in comparison to text-based passwords.
PassBeat offers an intuitive and more natural authentication experience by using rhythms instead of letters and numbers.
Nowadays, passwords are ubiquitous. However, conventional text-based passwords are far from user friendly due to the huge trade off between security and convenience, as well as security and the difficulty to memorize the password. To solve this problem, we propose rhythm-based authentication.
With PassBeat, we provide a research tool to conduct a field study and collect data in order to answer the following question:
Are rhythm-based passwords easier to remember than conventional, text-based passwords?
There are several existing rhythm-based authentication schemes which have been shown to be both highly user friendly and secure against attackers. However, long term research on the retentiveness of rhythm-based passwords remains to be done.
To answer our research question we plan to conduct a field study using our PassBeat tool for data collection.
As this is the first prototype there are, as suspected, several limitations and problems with the design that should be addressed before moving on to further development. Further user testing using a large number of people would also be required to make any statistically significant conclusions. From a technical point of view these first results seem promising, but many improvements could be made to decrease the number of false positives and false negatives.
Since the time scope of our project was quite limited, there are several points that could be further elaborated in future work such as conducting long term studies or extending our research tool.