Overview

Original Research

A COMPARATIVE STUDYBETWEEN PIN-CODE AND PATTERN-BASEDSECURITYLOCK IMPLEMENTATIONSON ANDROID DEVICES

FELICISIMO V. WENCESLAO, JR.

Vol 17, No 06 ( 2022 )   |  DOI: 10.5281/zenodo.6686420   |   Author Affiliation: College of Information and Computing Studies, Northern Iloilo State University, Estancia, Iloilo.   |   Licensing: CC 4.0   |   Pg no: 901-909   |   To cite: FELICISIMO V. WENCESLAO, JR. (2022). A COMPARATIVE STUDYBETWEEN PIN-CODE AND PATTERN-BASEDSECURITYLOCK IMPLEMENTATIONSON ANDROID DEVICES. 17(06), 901–909. https://doi.org/10.5281/zenodo.6686420   |   Published on: 20-06-2022

Abstract

Today's Smartphone has the capacity to store a variety of sensitive information for personal and professional use. However, despite of the abundance of features to secure one's phone, many users still leave their devices unprotected putting them at risk. Several vendors of smart phones started to offer different security features for privacy and protection. Two of the most common methods used are PIN and Pattern locking mechanisms. This study aimed to determine the Smartphone security preference of the respondents, the reasons for choosing such facility and which between the two locking mechanisms provides better security based on the number of failed attempts. There were 192randomly selected participants of the study who were students enrolled in the Bachelor of Science in Information Technology at Northern Iloilo Polytechnic State College in Estancia, Iloilo during the second semester of school year 2020-2021. Among the participants, 162 were surveyed of their preferred Smartphone security lock using a researcher-made questionnaire while 30 participants were requested to take part in an experiment of cracking the pre-set security codes. They were to by-pass the four-dot Pattern-based code and the four-digit PIN-code. The numbers of attempts were recorded accordingly. One hundred (61.73%) respondents opted to use the pattern-based while 62 (38.27%) respondents chose the PIN-code. Regardless of the type of locking mechanism, the main reason for choosing the facility is for privacy and protection. Finally, it was found out that the Pattern-based locking mechanism is more secure than the PIN-code locking mechanism because there were more failed attempts made by the participants for the Pattern-based as compared to the PIN-code. However, the results of the study further revealed that there was no significant difference between the two locking mechanisms as to the number of failed attempts.

Keywords

Smartphone, Smartphone security, PIN code, Pattern-based