One Touch Logon: Replacing Multiple Passwords with Single Fingerprint Recognition

Abstract — User authentication is still heavily reliant on the use of passwords, and the security problems associated with passwords are becoming more and more serious. The main causes of these problems are the prevalence of password sniffing and the difficulty of password management due to the increased number of accessible systems. In this paper, we propose a personal password management system called "One Touch Logon”, which replaces the annoying password-based authentication systems with a simple touch-and-login method. The effectiveness of the proposed system is demonstrated by implementing it on widely-used legacy systems such as Microsoft Windows and Web site logons. This mechanism is easy to implement and integrate with current password-based systems through the use of an inexpensive consumer electronic device allowing for fingerprint recognition. Moreover, eliminating the burden of memorizing multiple passwords enables the user to choose hard-to-guess passwords and further increases the utilization of Internet services while improving their accessibility. Our empirical study shows that One Touch Logon gives more benefits as the number of employing sites increases, especially when exceeding the number three1. Index Terms — Password sniffing, fingerprint authentication