The growth of the online applications and the concept of online working have increased the growth of data, which is of importance to a person or even for the whole of the organization. As the volume of data is increasing online, its raising the need that the data should protected from unauthorized access. Hackers and intruders, always in the attempt to hack or gain unauthorized access to the data. As a result, password authentication methods are also changing. One way to process the data is by authenticating the users trying to access the information. The authentication method most often used for security is password authentication. Several password-based authentication mechanisms have been proposed to counteract these attacks. Text password-based authentication mechanism is known for selection of a weak and easy to remember passwords. Now, if we compare with the graphical password, they are more interactive for users and less prone to attacks like dictionary attacks, brute force attacks and more. Our study of existing Text pass and word graphical authentication systems shows that several of them compromise their security while making the authentication process simpler, which could lead to perpetration of numerous attacks like shoulder surfing, hidden camera, smudge, and many other attack. Furthermore, a few of them sacrifice performance while targeting security alone. In this paper, we reviews the various research works which are done in the field of the text passwords, graphical password and captcha passwords, and also summarized the work they presented.

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Keywords: Computer Security, Usability, Security Attack, Text Password, Graphical Password.