How Android unlocking patterns could be made more secure

guest · Jul 26, 2021

How Android unlocking patterns could be made more secure
July 23, 2021
https://techxplore.com/news/2021-07-android-patterns.html

Users of Android devices can unlock the display by entering a pattern. This function is convenient and thus popular—however, less secure than locking with a PIN.

An international research team thus recommends implementing a blocklist on Android devices that prohibits the 100 most popular patterns, which are thus the easiest to guess. Precisely how this needs to be created has been investigated by Philipp Markert from the Horst Görtz Institute for IT Security at Ruhr-Universität Bochum together with colleagues from The George Washington University and the United States Navy.
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Blocklist with 100 patterns recommended
"The medium-length list with 100 blocklisted patterns is the best compromise between security and usability," summarizes Miles Grant from The George Washington University. With this blocklist, users took an average of 19 seconds to select a non-blocklisted pattern.
Security increases, even with the shortest blocklist
The researchers also verified to what extent the blocklists affected the security of the patterns. They simulated how easily an attacker could guess the pattern of a stolen mobile phone. Without a blocklist, the chance of success was 23.7 percent after 30 attempted guesses. With the longest blocklist, it was 2.3 percent.
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Using a Blocklist to Improve the Security of User Selection of Android Patterns

We find that even the smallest blocklist (12 patterns) had benefits, reducing a simulated attacker's success rate after 30 guesses from 24% to 20%. The largest blocklist (581 patterns) reduced the percentage of correctly guessed patterns after 30 attempts down to only 2%.
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Technical Paper (PDF): https://gwusec.seas.gwu.edu/android-pattern-blocklists/soups21-84-pattern-blocklist.pdf

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