What is it about?
How do users choose the PIN for their mobile phones, and how can they be convinced to use a more secure number combination? This paper finds that 6-digit PINs actually provide little more security than 4-digit ones. It also shows that the blacklist used by Apple to prevent particularly frequent PINs could be optimized and that it would make even greater sense to implement one on Android devices.
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Why is it important?
Apple and Android implement several measures to protect their users’ devices. This paper investigated how useful they are. Moreover, it shows whether 4- or 6-digit PINs are more secure and how users actually come to their choices.
Perspectives
Smartphones become more and more important in our everyday lives: we use them to text our family and friends, check our emails, or pay our groceries with them. Therefore, securing them also becomes more and more important because we of course don't want anyone else to have access to any of these things. But if our phone gets stolen or we lose it, this is exactly what can happen if we use an insecure PIN.
Philipp Markert
Ruhr-Universitat Bochum
Read the Original
This page is a summary of: On the Security of Smartphone Unlock PINs, ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security, November 2021, ACM (Association for Computing Machinery),
DOI: 10.1145/3473040.
You can read the full text:
Resources
Website
Official website of the project.
Conference Presentation
Presentation given at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP '20).
Conference Slides
Slides of the presentation given at the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy ( SP '20).
Setup
Setup used to extract the iOS blocklists.
Official Press Release
Official press release from the Ruhr University Bochum, Germany.
Contributors
The following have contributed to this page
