Arranging the layout of alphanumeric buttons-the role of passwords

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

Abstract

A typical but trivial layout of alphanumeric buttons in the touchscreen setting is to arrange the 10 digits and 26 letters in a natural order. This arrangement does not take into account the frequencies of letters and digits when the users touch the buttons to key in their passwords or messages. We examine large scale datasets of over 141 million passwords collected from several leading websites for social networking, Internet forums, gaming, dating, and various other online service providers in China, and find that the distribution of letters in passwords is quite close to that in Chinese language. Based on the letter/digit frequencies, we further propose an alphanumeric button layout scheme with the following advantages: the buttons are clicked as uniformly as possible, so that the lifetime of the touchscreen can be prolonged and finger oil residues may scatter more evenly over the button area of the screen; and in the meantime, the movements of users' fingers are improved to enhance good user experience when inputting messages. The idea behind the layout is potentially applicable to diversified races. Copyright is held by the author/owner(s).

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
PublisherAssociation for Computing Machinery
Pages1457-1459
Number of pages3
ISBN (Print)9781450329576
DOIs
StatePublished - 3 Nov 2014
Event21st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2014 - Scottsdale, United States
Duration: 3 Nov 20147 Nov 2014

Publication series

NameProceedings of the ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
ISSN (Print)1543-7221

Conference

Conference21st ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security, CCS 2014
Country/TerritoryUnited States
CityScottsdale
Period3/11/147/11/14

Keywords

  • Alphanumeric button
  • Passwords
  • Touchscreen

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