Passwords have been around for as long as we can remember and this means that incredibly weak passwords have been common for quite some time now, it’s not unheard of people choosing weak passwords like “12345” or “password,” they’re predictable and thus leave them open to nosy people. It turns out that Android lock patterns, commonly used to secure access to Android devices, are just as predictable as common passwords.
Marte Løge, a graduate of the Norwegian University of Science and Technology, analyzed 4,000 Android lock patterns for her master’s thesis and discovered that 77 percent of the participants predictably started from one of the four corners.
She also found that 44 percent of the participants started their patterns from the top left corner. Løge detailed her findings at the PasswordsCon conference in Las Vegas, saying that they’re noticing the same aspects used when creating lock patterns as are used in alphanumeric passwords and pin codes.
It was deduced using the mock patterns that participants created that most people use only four nodes, pattern locks with eight nodes were the least popular. Interestingly some 10 percent of the patterns used nodes that make up letters like M or N, usually they would represent a user’s significant other or child.
Since Android lock patterns are relatively new researchers do need to look at them more closely for better results, but for now Løge suggests that the best practice for lock patterns is to not start from a corner, use crossovers and as many nodes as possible.
Filed in . Read more about Android. Source: arstechnica