• Journal of the Korea Convergence Society
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• v.8 no.6
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• pp.37-44
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• 2017

Mobile devices provide various services through payment and authentication by inputting important information such as passwords on the screen with the virtual keypads. In order to infer the password inputted by the user, the attacker captures the user's touch location information. The attacker is able to infer the password by using the location information or to obtain password information by peeping with Google Glass or Shoulder Surfing Attack. As existing secure keypads place the same letters in a set order except for few keys, considering handy input, they are vulnerable to attacks from Google Glass and Shoulder Surfing Attack. Secure keypads are able to improve security by rearranging various shapes and locations. In this paper, we propose secure keypads that generates 13 different shapes and sizes of Tetris and arranges keypads to be attached one another. Since the keypad arranges different shapes and sizes like the game, Tetris, for the virtual keypad to be different, it is difficult to infer the inputted password because of changes in size even though the attacker knows the touch location information.

• The Journal of the Korea Contents Association
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• v.11 no.12
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• pp.12-18
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• 2011

Most smartphone use virtual keypads based on touch-pad. The virtual keypads often make typographical errors because of the physical limitations of device such as small screen and limited input methods. To resolve this problem, many similar word-finding methods have been studied. In the paper, we propose an edit distance method (a well-known string similarity measure) that is modified to consider various types of virtual keypads. The proposed method effectively covers typographical errors in various keypads by converting an input string into a physical key sequence and by reflecting characteristics of virtual keypads to edit scores. In the experiments with various keypads, the proposed method showed better performances than a typical edit distance method.

• Journal of Internet Computing and Services
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• v.14 no.3
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• pp.15-21
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• 2013

Due to the widespread propagation of mobile platforms such as smartphones and tablets, financial and e-commercial transactions based on these mobile platforms are growing rapidly. Unlike PCs, almost all mobile platforms do not provide physical keyboards or mice but provide virtual keypads using touchscreens. For this reason, an attacker attempts to obtain the coordinates of touches on the virtual keypad in order to get actual key values. To tackle this vulnerability, financial applications for mobile platforms use secure keypads, which change position of each key displayed on the virtual keypad. However, these secure keypads cannot protect users' private information more securely than the virtual keypads because each key has only 2 or 3 positions and moreover its probability distribution is not uniform. In this paper, we analyze secure keypads used by the most financial mobile applications, point out the limitation of the previous research, and then propose a more general and accurate attack method on the secure keypads.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.10 no.8
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• pp.144-151
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• 2020

User-authentication process is necessary in Fintech Service. Especially, authentication on smartphones are carried out through PIN which is inputted through virtual keypads on touch screen. Attacker can analogize password by watching touched letter and position over the shoulder or using high definition cameras. To prevent password spill, various research of virtual keypad techniques are ongoing. It is hard to design secure keypad which assures safety by fluctuative keypad and enhance convenience at once. Also, to reconfirm user whether password is wrongly pressed, the inputted information is shown on screen. This makes the password easily exposed through high definition cameras or Google Class during recording. This research analyzed QWERTY based secure keypad's merits and demerits. And through these features, creating Tetris shaped keypad and piece them together on Android environment, and showing inputted words as Tetris shape to users through smart-screen is suggested for the ways to prevent password spill by recording.

• Journal of Convergence for Information Technology
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• v.12 no.3
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• pp.38-45
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• 2022

Due to the development of fintech technology, financial transactions using smart phones are being activated. The password for user authentication during financial transactions is entered through the virtual keypad displayed on the screen of the smart phone. When the password is entered, the attacker can find out the password by capturing it with a high-resolution camera or spying over the shoulder. A virtual keypad with security applied to prevent such an attack is difficult to input on a small touch-screen, and there is still a vulnerability in peeping attacks. In this paper, the entire keypad is divided into several groups and displayed on a small screen, touching the group to which the character to be input belongs, and then touching the corresponding character within the group. The proposed method selects the group to which the character to be input belongs, and displays the keypad in the group on a small screen with no more than 10 keypads, so that the size of the keypad can be enlarged more than twice compared to the existing method, and the location is randomly placed, hence location of the touch attacks can be blocked.

• Journal of Practical Engineering Education
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• v.15 no.3
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• pp.641-647
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• 2023

In the fintech environment, ensuring secure financial transactions with smartphones requires authenticating the device owner. Smartphone authentication techniques encompass a variety of approaches, such as passwords, biometrics, SMS authentication, and more. Among these, password-based authentication is commonly used and highly convenient for user authentication. Although it is a simple authentication mechanism, it is susceptible to eavesdropping and keylogging attacks, alongside other threats. Security keypads have been proposed to address vulnerabilities in password input on smartphones. One such innovation is a group keypad, resistant to attacks that guess characters based on touch location. However, improvements are needed for user convenience. In this study, we aim to propose a method that enhances convenience while being resistant to eavesdropping and recording attacks on the existing group keypad. The proposed method uses new signs to allow users to verify instead of the last character confirmation easily and employs dragging-to-touch for blocking recording attacks. We suggest diverse positioning methods tailored for domestic users, improving efficiency and security in password input compared to existing methods.