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Top1. Introduction
Recent growth in the field of Information Technology has led to development of smaller and smarter hand-held devices. Owing to their usage and benefits, these smart devices would become an indispensable part of our daily lives. However, although such smart devices would be of great use to the mankind, it should be kept in mind that they would eventually be the storehouses of our personal information of various kinds. This makes them highly susceptible to potential security breaches and attacks (Khari, Shrivastava, Gupta, & Gupta, 2017; Saxena, Shrivastava, & Sharma, 2012). In order to avoid any catastrophic situation, these smart devices would require proper user authentication mechanism (Ledru et al., 2015). User authentication is the essential component of a secure system and encompasses multiple aspects of security; viz. identification, verification and authorization. The elementary form of user authentication is by the use of passwords (Abhishek, Roshan, Kumar, & Ranjan, 2013). However, being only a series of characters (numeric, alphanumeric, and special characters), selecting a strong, unbreakable password becomes challenging sometimes. Generally, users tend to choose passwords that are short and easy to remember. Moreover, most of the devices provide supports for passwords in either Latin or other well-known scripts that are supported by their input keyboards. This renders the chosen password to be guessable and easy to crack using dictionary attacks. In order to counter such situations, use of handwritten texts as passwords can be a solution. Such passwords must be written in any native scripts only. Using such a mechanism of securing smart devices would provide an improved and enhanced security since intruding such devices would require identifying the script in which the password has been set, as well as the knowledge about that script (Malempati & Mogalla, 2011). This mechanism would, however, require efficient techniques for recognizing the handwritten scripts as well as the words. Moreover, the recognition techniques need to be online rather than offline.