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Researchers at Rutgers University and Aalto University are studying the utility of what they call “free-form gesture authentication” - basically, using one or several fingers to draw any shape or pattern on the screen to prove your identity along with your username. After having a group of people test out such passwords to access apps on Android smartphones while another group used standard text-based passwords, they say that doodling a figure on your touch screen is quicker and just as memorable as a text password.

The researchers found that people using gestures rather than text as their passwords took 22 percent less time to log in to the dummy accounts. It also took gesture users 42 percent less time to come up with gesture passwords in the first place.

A paper detailing the work will be presented in May at the ACM-CHI computer-human interaction conference in San Jose, California.