The Effect of Users’ Working Memory on Preference and Performance in Authentication Mechanisms

An effective authentication mechanism should embrace both security and usability aspects as its purpose is to provide maximum protection of application providers’ assets but as well usability and transparency to its end users, aiming to minimize cognitive overloads. With the aim to investigate the relation among users’ working memory capacity and different types of authentication mechanisms, a study was conducted which entailed a psychometric-based survey for identifying users’ working memory capacity, combined with a real usage scenario with two variations of authentication mechanisms. A total of 97 users participated in the reported study during a 5-month period providing interesting insights with respect to users’ working memory and preference and performance of authentication mechanisms.