Evaluation of the Multifactor Authentication Technique for Mobile Applications

Abstract

Nowadays, mobile smartphones are popular devices among general population. Compared to the traditional mobile phone, smartphone is closer to a personal computer with a good number of mobile applications installed. However, when a user browses certain mobile application, his or her account is at risks if static password is the only element required for authentication. To overcome this problem, multi-factor authentication is widely required for mobile applications. In this paper, we conduct a survey for a group of mobile application users and analyze the pros and cons of each authentication method by case studies. We focus on six main factors to evaluate each authentication method. Our study found that traditional password authentication, biometrics authentication methods such as fingerprint, face, and voice scored relatively high on Convenience, Time, Security and Accuracy. More important, these four aspects are exactly the most essential factors to a mobile application’s quality that relate to safety issue and user experience as well. Our evaluation results show that biometric authentication methods are currently used most often by mobile applications and well accepted by its users. Overall, we evaluated five cases with advantages and disadvantages. We found fingerprint, voice authentication played outstanding as biometric authentication methods. We also come up with a new authentication proposal for mobile application design and for the future research that in view of mobile devices are more and more functional nowadays, we recommend mobile applications to use biometric authentication in two steps authentication methods.