EFFICIENT GRAPHICAL RANDOMIZED AUTHENTICATION (g-RAT) TECHNIQUE FOR SECURE FILE ACCESS IN CONSUMER STORAGE DEVICES

Security is the main aspect for any application. The main aim is to protect the system from the illegitimate users. The proposed system is considered for study and two way authentication techniques are applied on it. Two way authentication techniques are used to protect the data by using both the text and graphical passwords. Graphical password scheme is used named as g-RAT. On both the text as well as graphical password, Improved Advanced Encryption Standard (IAES) algorithm is applied to provide better security. It means system provides two step authentications with the encryption technique. In IAES, one random generated key called as SALT is added with AES key. By adding the Salt key with AES the number of combinations of attack will increase. Even if the database is compromised then also attacker cannot gain the actual text password and g-RAT of the graphical password. g-RAT is used which generates a randomized set of images every time a user tries to authenticate him/herself by maintaining the security and usability at the same time. The gRAT technique is also tested by user-centric evaluation in terms of security, usability, usefulness, and utility, and the experimental results show that the proposed technique is more secure and useful in the real-life authentication applications.