Doodling our way to better authentication

Abstract

Password security often fails in practice because users select predictable passwords. We conducted a study to explore the use of hand-drawn doodle password ("passdoodle"). Our findings show that users could recall all visual elements of the doodle as well as they could recall alphanumeric passwords, but most could not perfectly redraw their selected doodles. Users perceive passdoodles as easier to remember than alphanumeric passwords; however, they prefer whichever authentication method they perceive to be more secure.