User Perceptions of Security and Usability of Mobile-Based Single Password Authentication and Two-Factor Authentication

Two-factor authentication provides a significant improvement over the security of traditional password-based authentication by requiring users to provide an additional authentication factor, e.g., a code generated by a security token. In this decade, single password authentication (SPA) schemes are introduced to overcome the challenges of traditional password authentication, which is vulnerable to the offline dictionary, phishing, honeypot, and man-in-the-middle attacks. Unlike classical password-based authentication systems, in SPA schemes the user is required to remember only a single password (and a username) for all her accounts, while the password is protected against the afore-mentioned attacks in a provably secure manner.