Using GPUs to Crack Android Pattern-Based Passwords

Abstract

We investigate the strength of patterns as secret signatures in Android's pattern based authentication mechanism. Parallelism of GPU is exploited to exhaustively search for the secret pattern. Typically, searching for a pattern, composed of a number of nodes and edges, requires an exhaustive search for the pattern. In this work, we show that the use of GPU can speed up the graph search, hence the pattern password, through parallelization. Preliminary results on cracking the Android pattern based passwords shows that the technique can be used as the basis to implement a tool that can check the strength of a pattern based password and thereby recommend strong patterns to the user.