Development and Evaluation of an Authentication System Employing Question and Answer

Abstract

 In order to authenticate accurately and safely an user as the authorized person who could access to a system, we devised a new authentication system employing method of “a question to an user and the answer from him/her” which can be applied to any environment of computer and communications, and we evaluated degree of accuracy and security and operability of our system. In our system, the server side sends an user questions which could be answered only by reflecting his/her private life or past private events. The system does not require any special hardware nor software to be implemented beforehand. The result of evaluation showed obvious superiority of the level of accuracy, security, operability and even robustics over conventional password method. From the results of our study, we could reconfirm that our proposed method could realize accurate and effective authentication even though users had to prepare their own questions and answers beforehand.