Although the traditional password authentication scheme is so widely used, it still has a few significant drawbacks. One of these weaknesses is that the strength of the password depends largely on the user. A poorly chosen password is weak against brute force attacks as well as dictionary attacks.
Due to this fact, there has been a lot of research regarding cognitive authentications schemes, where the user is authenticated with a system based on their answers to a number of cognitive challenges. This thesis conducts research on a few of these schemes and analyses their strengths and weaknesses. A cognitive scheme is also implemented and put through a usability test.
Our results suggest that the scheme implemented in this thesis is not practical as an authentication scheme for everyday use. The concept of cognitive authentication schemes does, however, show a lot of promise. A larger study would have to be conducted to come to a more sound conclusion.