Abstract:The graphical password mitigates the burden of memorizing traditional textual passwords and simplifies the process of entering passwords, which has been widely applied to user authentication of mobile devices in recent years. Existing graphical password authentication schemes face critical threats. First, graphical passwords are vulnerable to shoulder-surfing attacks, namely that users’ graphical passwords may be leaked if attackers capture their login information through eyes or cameras. More seriously, these schemes are subject to credential leakage attacks. In other words, as the server stores authentication credentials related to the graphical passwords of users to verify their identities, if attackers obtain these credentials, they can perform offline password guessing attacks to retrieve users’ graphical passwords. To solve the above problems, this study proposes a secure graphical password authentication scheme, dubbed GADL. GADL embeds random challenge values into the graphical passwords of users to resist shoulder-surfing attacks, and thus attackers cannot obtain users’ passwords even if they capture their login information. To address credential database leakage of the server, GADL utilizes a deterministic threshold blind signature technique to protect users’ graphical passwords. In this technique, multiple key servers are utilized to assist users in the credential generation, which ensures that attackers cannot perform offline guessing attacks to obtain any knowledge of users’ passwords even if they obtain users’ credentials. The security analysis given in this study proves that GADL is resistant to the aforementioned attacks. In addition, the comprehensive performance evaluation of GADL demonstrates its high performance in terms of computation, storage, and communication overhead and proves that it can be easily deployed on mobile devices.