Effect of Mood, Location, Trust, and Presence of Others on Video-Based Social Authentication

Current fallback authentication mechanisms are unreliable (e.g., security questions are easy to guess) and need improvement. Social authentication shows promise as a novel form of fallback authentication. In this paper, we report the results of a four-week study that explored people's perceived willingness to use video chat as a form of social authentication. We investigated whether people's mood, location, and trust, and the presence of others affected perceived willingness to use video chat to authenticate. We found that participants who were alone, reported a more positive mood, and had more trust in others reported more willingness to use video chat as an authentication method. Participants also reported more willingness to help others to authenticate via video chat than to initiate a video chat authentication session themselves. Our results provide initial insights into human-computer interaction issues that could stem from using video chat as a fallback authentication method within a small social network of people (e.g., family members and close friends) who know each other well and trust each other.