We had long moved away from the age where we had to settle for the alphanumeric or pin passwords when securing the Smartphones. Now most of the Smartphone users use the Android Lock screen pattern to secure their phones but a recent study can put in a fix. A recent study had shown that there are many people who make use of analogous patterns to unchain the handsets, which make it extremely easier to be guessed by the criminals.
A smart study conducted by a student about lock screen
Marte Loge is a student of Norwegian college who had undertaken a study to understand the security level of the password pattern. She had conducted her study by using sampled 4000 user generated Android Lock Screen Pattern as a part of her thesis. This study revealed that 44% of contestants begin their lock-screen prototype password commencing from top-left angle and 10% of the patterns happen to generate a letter for instance N or C.
How the study was conducted?
In this study, the participants were asked to generate 3 Android Lock prototypes. Three lock screen pattern were aimed at three distinct things namely for a pretended shopping app, false banking app while the last one was aimed at unlocking the phone. This study showed that most of the people were happy to choose creating a lock screen pattern, which travelled through the least amount of nodules. The least number of nodules of dots refers to just four in number which is fairly less secure pattern than the pattern which uses the most number of nodes.
The link between the nodes and lock screen pattern security
Android lock screen pattern allows a user to choose a lock screen using between four to nine nodes. Using more number of nodes results in having a highly secure password on the basis of probability. In this regard a minimum four node lock screen pattern will have 1624 possible pattern combinations, 5 nodes with 7152 combinations, 6 nodes with 26016 combinations, 7 nodes with 72912 combinations, 8 nodes with 140704 combinations and 9 nodes with 140704 combinations.
During the study on an average participant used five nodes, which mean there are just less than 8000 possible combinations for the lock screen pattern, but using the four-node pattern this combination dropped to mere 1624 numbers. Furthermore, most of the people chose such patterns, which stimulated from left on the way to right this making it extremely easy for the hackers to guess their combinations.
Men Smartphone users use more secure patterns
On the gender basis, men are most likely to use lengthy, confusing and intricate lock screen pattern rather the female counterpart, which settled with short and simple lock screen patterns. There is very little difference in the way lock screen pattern are chosen by the right handed or left handed participant. This study reflects that humans are highly predictable in nature when it comes to creating pattern locks, alphanumeric and pin codes passwords.
This study suggests that using ‘crossovers’ patterns and not beginning from any corner is best way of producing safe password patterns. Essentially using the elongated and intricate password patterns are extremely secure in nature than any other password pattern.
