Development Status and Prospects of Graphical Password Authentication System in Korea

Security is becoming more important as society changes rapidly. In addition, today's ICT environment demands changes in existing security technologies. As a result, password authentication methods are also changing. The authentication method most often used for security is password authentication. The most-commonly used passwords are text-based. Security enhancement requires longer and more complex passwords, but long, complex, text-based passwords are hard to remember and inconvenient to use. Therefore, authentication techniques that can replace text-based passwords are required today. Graphical passwords are more difficult to steal than text-based passwords and are easier for users to remember. In recent years, researches into graphical passwords that can replace existing text-based passwords are being actively conducting in various places throughout the world. This article surveys recent research and development directions of graphical password authentication systems in Korea. For this purpose, security authentication methods using graphical passwords are categorized into technical groups and the research associated with graphical passwords performed in Korea is explored. In addition, the advantages and disadvantages of all investigated graphical password authentication methods were analyzed along with their characteristics.