## 4 Discussion and Result Analysis  
To test the MFA algorithm, a functional prototype of the algorithm was deployed using the expo go platform, making it available for users as a mobile app for both android and IOS. The algorithm was tested on users from different backgrounds, including young technology savvy users, and older users with little familiarity to new technologies. Table 1 depicts the demographics of the users that tested the mechanism. The experimentation and testing of the app was carried out following a specific procedure. All 52 users tested the application twice. On the first encounter, each user followed the setup process to configure their authentication profile, and then each user went on to attempt authentication as many times as they needed so they could get a feel of the algorithm and get accustomed to it. One week later, all 52 users tested the application for a second time. This time, they were only required to attempt authentication. This was done to gather information regarding the difficulties that the user could encounter when attempting to authenticate after an extended period. After each user finished testing for the second time, a survey was conducted to gather information about the qualitative aspects of the algorithm, such as \begin{table}
\begin{tabular}{c c c c c} \hline \hline
**Users** & **\% of Male Users** & **\% of Female Users** & **\% of Users between 18 and 30 Years Old** & **\% of Users Accustomed** \\ \hline
52 & 72\% & 28\% & 70\% & 30\% & 73\% \\ \hline \hline \end{tabular}
\end{table} 
Table 1: User demographic information. Figure 8: (**a**) Authentication screen; (**b**) Authentication screen with react native modal displayed. user experience, difficulty in remembering the authentication elements (images, relations), user approval, etc. Once the testing was done, information was collected regarding the authentication process of the algorithm. The proposed MFA mechanism achieved 100% accuracy in identifying and authenticating users if they did not forget their authentication elements and credentials. Table 2 shows that the 52 users made a total of 425 authentication attempts, out of which 70.35% were successful; the failed attempts were due to users forgetting their authentication elements, which is discussed later. The average authentication time recorded for the successful attempts was 19.75 s, which was a satisfactory result, considering that the standard MFA takes an average of 15 s to complete [33]. On top of that it was an early experimentation stage, as well as the users' very first authentication attempts. There were authentication times as long as 75 s, and as low as 6 s. Nonetheless, it was observed that the authentication time was directly related to the ability of the user to remember the authentication elements (images, relations), as well as their focus on the authentication process. Note that these results were from the very first authentication attempts from users with no previous experience or knowledge of the mechanism, and so would certainly change as the users became accustomed to the mechanisms. In the following attempts, the percentage of successful authentications would be higher. Table 2 shows that 29.64% of all authentication attempts failed. Considering there were two steps to the authentication process, the first requiring users to select four out of 12 images that belonged to them, and the second step requiring users to establish a relation between two of the images that were selected, it was necessary to know where the users were failing. As shown in Figure 9, most failed authentications happened when the user had to establish relations between the images. Via user input, it was determined that the cause of these failed authentication attempts was due to the users having forgotten the relations established between the given images. Figure 10 shows that out of the 585 total relations that were established by all 52 users (in average, each user established 11 relations), 81% of them were established using the