Paper Info
Title
The Memory Palace: Exploring Visual-Spatial Paths for Strong, Memorable, Infrequent Authentication
Abstract
Many accounts and devices require only infrequent authentication by an individual, and thus authentication secrets should be both secure and memorable without much reinforcement. Inspired by people's strong visual-spatial memory, we introduce a novel system to help address this problem: the Memory Palace. The Memory Palace encodes authentication secrets as paths through a 3D virtual labyrinth navigated in the first-person perspective. We ran two experiments to iteratively design and evaluate the Memory Palace. In the first, we found that visual-spatial secrets are most memorable if navigated in a 3D first-person perspective. In the second, we comparatively evaluated the Memory Palace against Android's 9-dot pattern lock along three dimensions: memorability after one week, resilience to shoulder surfing, and speed. We found that relative to 9-dot, complexity-controlled secrets in the Memory Palace were significantly more memorable after one week, were much harder to break through shoulder surfing, and were not significantly slower to enter.
Year
DOI
Venue
2019
10.1145/3332165.3347917
Proceedings of the 32nd Annual ACM Symposium on User Interface Software and Technology
Keywords
Field
DocType
authentication, cybersecurity, memory palace, method of loci, spatial memory, usable security, visual-spatial memory
Authentication,Computer science,Human–computer interaction,Multimedia
Conference
ISBN
Citations 
PageRank 
978-1-4503-6816-2
1
0.34
References 
Authors
0
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Sauvik Das1978.75
David Lu210.34
Taehoon Lee310.34
Joanne Lo4182.33
Haojian Jin54610.08