Visual Authentication on Mobile Devices

Abstract

The notion of visual authentication was first devised by Naor and Pinkas in 1997. They addressed that a straightforward application of a naïve visual cryptographic scheme in the authentication requirement is vulnerable and proposed a scheme incorporating visual cryptography with an additional encryption algorithm to achieve visual authentication. We develop a simple visual two-secret sharing scheme, without any other encryption algorithm, to accomplish the same goal in this paper. Our approach possesses the advantages of low-technology and portable which enable the authentication to be validated in a visual sense. A simple scenario of utilizing our scheme in the authentication phrase of E-payment via modern mobile cell phones is designed to show the feasibility of our ideas.