Spy-Resistant Keyboard: Towards More Secure Password Entry on Publicly Observable Touch Screens

Current software interfaces for entering text on touch screen devices mimic existing mechanisms such as keyboard typ- ing or handwriting. Unfortunately, these techniques are poor for entering private text such as passwords since they allow observers to figure out what has been typed just by watching. In this paper, we present the Spy-Resistant Key- board, a novel interface that allows users to enter private text without revealing it to an observer. We describe a user study we ran to explore the usability of the interface as well as additional security provided by it. Results indicate that although users took longer to enter their passwords, using the Spy-Resistant Keyboard rather than a standard onscreen soft keyboard resulted in a drastic increase in their ability to protect their passwords from a watchful observer. We dis- cuss future extensions to these ideas.