Shuja Shahzada

About

Shuja completed his Master’s in Human Computer Interaction in 2014.

His thesis was entitled “Touch interaction for user authentication”

Research Interests

Shuja explored alternative authentication for mobile devices. His proposed scheme involved using simple single and multi-touch gestures to authenticate on smartphone and tablets.

Thesis abstract

Touchscreens that permit multi-touch and gestures interaction are now commonplace. This thesis explores whether these new capabilities might support novel password schemes that could be a viable alternative to traditional text passwords. We conducted a preliminary study with a multi-touch graphically oriented password scheme that we designed called Passgrid and a main study with a multi-touch password scheme called GesturePass, which we designed to focus more on gestures. Our study compared Passgrid to a text password scheme in terms of login time, effect of screen size, and the overall user experience. Our ndings showed that users made little use of the multi-touch capability and so Passgrid had longer login times. We also found that users preferred using smaller touchscreen devices, and users responded favourably to the use of gestures. We then designed GesturePass specically to focus on gestures and smaller touchscreen devices. Our study compared the usability of GesturePass to a PIN password scheme. GesturePass required more initial practices, and had somewhat longer login times, but required a similar number of login attempts. We determined that the longer login times stemmed from certain complex gestures that could potentially be simplified, and that GesturePass could potentially be a viable authentication approach.

Publications

Extended Abstracts and Workshop Papers

• Shuja Shahzada, Sonia Chiasson, and Robert Biddle. [Workshop paper] Gesture Authentication for Mobile Devices. WAY Workshop, Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS), 2014.
  [Bibtex]

  @MISC{shahzada2014gesture-way,
  author = {Shahzada, Shuja and Chiasson, Sonia and Biddle, Robert},
  title = {[Workshop paper] Gesture Authentication for Mobile Devices},
  howpublished = {WAY Workshop, Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS)},
  year = {2014},
  note = {Extended Abstracts and Workshop Papers}
  }

Theses

• Shuja Shahzada. [Thesis] Touch interaction for user authentication. Master’s thesis, Human Computer Interaction, Carleton University, 2014.
  [Bibtex]

  @MASTERSTHESIS{shahzada2014thesis-carleton,
  author = {Shuja Shahzada},
  title = {[Thesis] Touch interaction for user authentication},
  school = {Human Computer Interaction, Carleton University},
  year = {2014},
  note = {Theses}
  }