Signature based password authentication method

To prevent illegal access to a computer and its resources, most systems in the market use password as the only means to ensure the user's identity. Although there are many password mechanisms proposed, most of them suffer from serious pitfalls associated with the tradeoff between memorizability and security. In the paper, we propose an additional level of security to the current password mechanism by incorporating an on-line signature based authentication method. The major advantages of the new method are that dynamic information of signing a signature is hidden from other users and the comparison process is made very efficient through the signature discretization process.