Necessity of Fourth Factor Authentication with Multiple Variations as Enhanced User Authentication Technique

Authentication plays a vital role in granting access to a user by any computing system. There are several existing authentication techniques used for different scenarios which include one-factor, two-factor, and three-factor authentication, where the user submits required credentials and gains access to the system. When a legitimate user is unable to provide his credentials at any point of time, the user becomes unauthenticated. At this juncture, we have proposed a fourth factor for authentication where a legitimate user can seek assistance from any of his close associates like a spouse, friend, and colleague and can gain access to the system for a single time. In this paper, we consider multiple variations of fourth-factor authentication and compare them within the framework and explore the mechanism by applying various metrics such as key size, the ease of use, time and space complexity of the algorithms, and security considerations.