Enterprise needs to process customer data for providing tailored services to them, however, the data often includes sensitive and personally identifiable information. This leads to a difficult situation wherein the enterprise has to balance the necessity to process the sensitive data with the requirement to safeguard its privacy. The problem is more prominent in legacy applications with almost no privacy controls in place. A well-studied technique to retrofit legacy application is to mask sensitive content before it is rendered on the screen using path based methods. In this work we show the gap in the existing state of art and describe a dynamic system which utilizes a context to perform locality based searching and masking of sensitive content.

The graphical pattern unlock scheme which requires users to connect a minimum of 4 nodes on 3X3 grid is one of the most popular authentication mechanism on mobile devices. However prior research suggests that users' pattern choices are highly biased and hence vulnerable to guessing attacks. Moreover, 3X3 pattern choices are devoid of features such as longer stroke lengths, direction changes and intersections that are considered to be important in preventing shoulder-surfing attacks. We attribute these insecure practices to the geometry of the grid and its complicated drawing rules which prevent users from realising the full potential of graphical passwords. In this paper, we propose and explore an alternate circular layout referred to as Pass-O which unlike grid layout allows connection between any two nodes, thus simplifying the pattern drawing rules. Consequently, Pass-O produces a theoretical search space of 9,85,824, almost 2.5 times greater than 3X3 grid layout. We compare the security of 3X3 and Pass-O patterns theoretically as well as empirically. Theoretically, Pass-O patterns are uniform and have greater visual complexity due to large number of intersections. To perform empirical analysis, we conduct a large-scale web-based user study and collect more than 1,23,000 patterns from 21,053 users. After examining user-chosen 3X3 and Pass-O patterns across different metrics such as pattern length, stroke length, start point, end point, repetitions, number of direction changes and intersections, we find that Pass-O patterns are much more secure than 3X3 patterns.

Markov-based strength meters provide more accurate estimate of password strength as opposed to rule-based strength meters. However, we observed that these meters assign very high scores to slightly altered weak passwords. It is important to score modified variants of weak passwords more conservatively as the existing password cracking tools generate such guesses much more quickly. In this paper, we propose a simple greedy algorithm to detect small alterations and improve the scoring mechanism of Markov strength meters.