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Passwords for Both Mobile and Desktop Computers: ObPwd for Firefox and Android
;login: Enters a New Phase of Its Evolution
For over 20 years, ;login: has been a print magazine with a digital version; in the two decades previous, it was USENIX’s newsletter, UNIX News. Since its inception 45 years ago, it has served as a medium through which the USENIX community learns about useful tools, research, and events from one another. Beginning in 2021, ;login: will no longer be the formally published print magazine as we’ve known it most recently, but rather reimagined as a digital publication with increased opportunities for interactivity among authors and readers.
Since USENIX became an open access publisher of papers in 2008, ;login: has remained our only content behind a membership paywall. In keeping with our commitment to open access, all ;login: content will be open to everyone when we make this change. However, only USENIX members at the sustainer level or higher, as well as student members, will have exclusive access to the interactivity options. Rik Farrow, the current editor of the magazine, will continue to provide leadership for the overall content offered in ;login:, which will be released via our website on a regular basis throughout the year.
As we plan to launch this new format, we are forming an editorial committee of volunteers from throughout the USENIX community to curate content, meaning that this will be a formally peer-reviewed publication. This new model will increase opportunities for the community to contribute to ;login: and engage with its content. In addition to written articles, we are open to other ideas of what you might want to experience.
Many users now access password-protected accounts and Web sites alternately from desktop machines and mobile devices (e.g., smartphones, tablets). The input mechanisms of the mobile devices are often miniature physical or virtual on-screen keyboards, posing challenges for users trying to type passwords with mixed-case and special characters expected by Web sites and more easily entered on desktop keyboards. We begin with a review of these challenges and existing proposals addressing cross-device password entry, including some password managers. We then bring the issues into focus with detailed discussion of the interoperational challenges and implementation and interface details of the object-based password (ObPwd) mechanism, as implemented for the Android platform, plus compatible browser-based and stand-alone implementations for desktop environments. ObPwd generates a password from a user-selected digital object (e.g., image), does not require changes to server-side software, and avoids the text-input challenges of mobile devices. We also briefly evaluate ObPwd using a recently proposed evaluation framework for password authentication schemes. A major goal is to increase attention to the cross-device password authentication problem.
Article Section:
SECURITY
;login: issue: