Constellation, le dépôt institutionnel de l'Université du Québec à Chicoutimi

Résumé

The growing market of mobile devices forces to question about how to protect users’ credentials and data stored on such devices. Authentication mechanisms remain the first layer of security in the use of mobile devices. However, several of such mechanisms that have been already proposed were designed in a machine point of view. As a matter of fact, they are not compatible with behaviors human have while using their mobile devices in the daily life. Consequently, users adopted unsafe habits that may compromise the proper functioning of authentica-tion mechanisms according to the safety aspect. In this chapter, the strength and the weakness of the current schemes, from the simpler ones such as PIN to the more complex biometric systems such as fingerprint, are high-lighted. Besides, we offer an evaluation, based on both existing and new criteria we suggest, chiefly focused on the usability of these schemes for the user. While each of them have benefits as well as disadvantages, we finally pro-pose a conclusion lean toward the aftermath of authentication on mobile devices that head for new perspectives as regards no password and ubiquitous authentication mechanisms.