The unlock pattern on an Android phone today has become like one of the safest measures to prevent someone curious from entering the guts of our phone to learn the secrets that we can have in it. Finally they are the photos of the grandmother, of that hamburger that we ate in that restaurant or the copy of the ticket of the plane ticket. What you imply with the unlock pattern is a security measure for protect our privacy or whatever we want.
If the passwords have already been questioned because in the end many are users who make them very simple without complications, which allows them to be discovered so that someone with bad intentions can enter our mail or what would be our account Online banking, now a Norwegian student has analyzed more than 4.000 patterns that can be carried out to launch a study on the trends we have in this form of security.
A «1234567» of the good ones
Marte Løge, the student in charge of this study, says that security patterns suffer from almost the same problem as passwords, predictability. The patterns listed in the header image are the most common, so it can become easy to unlock a terminal if you add to that some well-known trends.
More than 10 percent use their security pattern as if it were a letter of the alphabet and this is usually one of his initials or one of his children's own. Another of the data collected from their study is that 44 percent start from the upper left node of the screen, something that does not matter if the user is left-handed or right-handed.
Another curious fact is that 77 percent of the patterns they start from one of the four corners of the pattern and that the maximum number of nodes through which we pass reaches 5 while the others pass through four, which means that there can be a maximum of 1.624 total combinations.
Easy to predict
Løge herself, at a conference in Las Vegas, maintained as we are quite predictable and that we usually use the same aspects when we create an unlock pattern, a pin code or a password.
An unlock pattern may have a minimum of four nodes and a maximum of nine. In the image below you can see the number of combinations that the number of nodes used can make possible.
Another of the data that emerged from this study was when the participants were faced with the attempt to create a pattern for an online shopping app, an online banking app and another to unlock a smartphone. The funny thing was, the younger guys were the ones who created weirder and more intricate patterns. Something that maybe it has to do with age and as we are already sometimes exhausted by so many passwords for different services to which we can add these unlocking patterns.
Løge advises that let's try to use more nodes and make their pattern more complicated. Of course, this also means that we forget about it with the inconvenience that this can cause the user. So we are ultimately directed to create an easy "1234567" pattern.
An interesting study that continues to show how easy it can be to unlock your phoneAnd if the one who snoops starts to look at the reflection of the screen with the trace of the pattern of the pattern left previously, he will surely access the phone without hardly disheveled.