Abstract: Today Information Technology has gained momentum in our day today life. Information Technology means use of computers and internet to store and manipulate the information. So all the organizations, industries and also every individual are using computers to store and share or communicate the information. So here security is much important while storing and communicating the information over internet or through computer and its devices to avoid unauthorized access. For this security various techniques are available. Among them the most common and easy to use is a password. For security purpose every application provides user authentication. From ancient days, secret data or code is used for hiding and this gives security to information. Most traditional approach is in which we have to pass through username and password. Authentication process is divided into Token based authentication Biometric based authentication and Knowledge based authentication. Many web applications provide Knowledge based authentication which includes alphanumeric password and graphical password as well. In today's changing world when we are having number of networks and personal account some sort of easy authentication schema needs to be provided.

Keywords: Password, Graphical password, alphanumeric password, security primitive.