الفهرس 
IntroductionOnly 14 pages are availabe for public view
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Abstract
Data protection is the act of protecting users’ data from being illegally accessed, stored or shared without their knowledge or permission. The environments that contain this data are numerous. It could be stored in personal computers, servers or custom devices. When it comes to smartphone, it is a very personal device that store a plethora of sensitive personal data and serve as gateways to many online services. Unsurprisingly, unauthorized access to the smartphones is one of the highest security risks for users.
The main objective of this dissertation is to develop a principled under-standing of the data protection mechanisms in smartphones from authentication prospective.
To achieve this objective, we first performed a longitudinal field study, where we examined how the current authentication mechanisms perform in the wild in terms of time it takes to authenticate and error-rate, and how the users’ choices of the unlocking mechanisms are linked to the different patterns of smartphone us-age. Based on our findings, we offer insights into improving Android unlocking mechanisms and related user experience.
Second, we conducted an extensive survey of the recent development of ac-