Windows 8 Picture Passwords Easily Cracked

Windows 8 Picture Passwords Easily Cracked: It appears that picture gesture authentication (PGA) achieves only one of the two. Security researchers at Arizona State University and Delaware State University have found that Windows 8 picture passwords can be cracked with relative ease.

In a paper presented at the Usenix Conference earlier this month, “On the Security of Picture Gesture Authentication,” Ziming Zhao, Gail-Joon Ahn and Jeong-Jin Seo from Arizona State, and Hongxin Hu from Delaware State, claim that their experimental model and attack framework allowed them to crack 48% of passwords for previously unseen pictures in one dataset and 24% in another.