Graph coloring for enforcing password identification against brute force attacks

Abstract

Password Identification or Weak Authentication is one of the weakest points in accessing a system and a suitable point for recurrent attacks of crackers or sniffers. Breakdowns ranging from dictionary brute force attacks to password guesses have shown the increasing need for new types of identification forms based not only on characters' combination, but also taking into account the inherent advantages of the so-called Graphical Passwords. Using graph coloring for a password based system has always been an interesting proposal, but one of its main drawbacks was to teach the user some basic concepts of Graph Theory and also some Graph Coloring Algorithms. The following research tries to establish the usefulness of using password identification with graph coloring applied to graphical passwords, so that a common user could take advantage of this technique in a simplistic manner.