Position Paper: Measuring the Impact of Alphabet and Culture on Graphical Passwords

Android's graphical password scheme (sometimes referred to as the "password pattern") is perhaps the most widely used and most studied graphical password system to date. With its launch, Android's only authentication/unlock mechanism was the graphical password; however, other authentication systems are allowed today, such as PINs and text-based passwords. Despite the added authentication choices, the graphical password option remains a very popular choice among Android users.

The graphical password system requires users to select and recall a "pattern" drawn over a 3x3 grid of contact points, connecting between 4 and 9 contact points, without repetition. There are 392,112 possible password, which provide more choices than a 4-digit PIN (10,000); however, like all password systems, users do not choose uniformly from the set of available passwords. Recent studies have shown that the guessability strength of user-generated password patterns is on the order of a random 3-digit PIN and provides weaker security than one might expect.