Abstract

It is no secret that users have difficulty choosing and remembering strong passwords, especially when asked to choose different passwords across different accounts. While research has shed light on password weaknesses and reuse, less is known about user motivations for following bad password practices. Understanding these motivations can help us design better interventions that work with the habits of users and not against them.
We present a comprehensive user study in which we both collect and analyze users' real passwords and the reasoning behind their password habits. This enables us to contrast the users' actual behaviors with their intentions. We find that user intent often mismatches practice, and that this, coupled with some misconceptions and convenience, fosters bad password habits. Our work is the first to show the discrepancy between user intent and practice when creating passwords, and to …

Metadata

publication

Proceedings of the 2018 CHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems …, 2018

year

2018

publication date

2018/4/21

authors

Ameya Hanamsagar, Simon S Woo, Chris Kanich, Jelena Mirkovic

link

https://dl.acm.org/doi/abs/10.1145/3173574.3174144

resource_link

https://www.cs.uic.edu/~ckanich/papers/hanamsagar2018leveraging.pdf

book

Proceedings of the 2018 CHI conference on human factors in computing systems

pages

1-12