A Visibility-Based Lower Bound for Android Unlock Patterns

Abstract

The Android pattern unlock is a widely adopted graphical password system that requires a user to draw a secret pattern connecting points arranged in a grid. The theoretical security of pattern unlock can be defined by the number of possible patterns. However, only upper bounds of the number of patterns have been known except for 3×3 and 4×4 grids for which the exact number of patterns was found by brute-force enumeration. In this letter, we present the first lower bound by computing the minimum number of visible points from each point in various subgrids. © 2017 The Institute of Electronics, Information and Communication Engineers.