Related papers: Long Passphrases: Potentials and Limits

As language models are increasingly deployed as autonomous agents in high-stakes settings, ensuring that they reliably follow user-defined rules has become a critical safety concern. To this end, we study whether language models exhibit…

As network security issues continue gaining prominence, password security has become crucial in safeguarding personal information and network systems. This study first introduces various methods for system password cracking, outlines…

The choice of password composition policy to enforce on a password-protected system represents a critical security decision, and has been shown to significantly affect the vulnerability of user-chosen passwords to guessing attacks. In…

Although security questions are still widely adopted, they still have several limitations. Previous research found that using system-generated information to answer security questions could be more secure than users' own answers. However,…

Password managers have the potential to help users more effectively manage their passwords and address many of the concerns surrounding password-based authentication, however prior research has identified significant vulnerabilities in…

For the first time, we report gender bias in people's choice and use of password managers, through a semi-structured interview ($n=18$) and a questionnaire-based survey ($n=200$, conducted `in the wild'). Not only do women and men prefer…

Password managers (PMs) are considered highly effective tools for increasing security, and a recent study by Pearman et al. (SOUPS'19) highlighted the motivations and barriers to adopting PMs. We expand these findings by replicating Pearman…

To protect against misuse of passwords compromised in a breach, consumers should promptly change affected passwords and any similar passwords on other accounts. Ideally, affected companies should strongly encourage this behavior and have…

Does the act of writing a specification (how the code should behave) for a piece of security sensitive code lead to developers producing more secure code? We asked 138 developers to write a snippet of code to store a password: Half of them…

We notice that the "password security" discourse is missing the most fundamental notion of the "password strength" -- it was never properly defined. We propose a canonical definition of the "password strength", based on the assessment of…

We introduce quantitative usability and security models to guide the design of password management schemes --- systematic strategies to help users create and remember multiple passwords. In the same way that security proofs in cryptography…

In this paper we will look at the distribution with which passwords are chosen. Zipf's Law is commonly observed in lists of chosen words. Using password lists from four different on-line sources, we will investigate if Zipf's law is a good…

Based on Irish older adult's perceptions, practices, and challenges regarding password management, the goal of this study was to compile suitable advice that can benefit this demographic. To achieve this, we first conducted semi structured…

Users often choose passwords that are easy to remember but also easy to guess by attackers. Recent studies have revealed the vulnerability of textual passwords to shoulder surfing and keystroke loggers. It remains a critical challenge in…

System passwords serve as critical credentials for user authentication and access control when logging into operating systems or applications. Upon entering a valid password, users pass verification to access system resources and execute…

Managing passwords securely and conveniently is still an open problem for many users. Existing research has examined users' password management strategies and identified pain points, such as security concerns, leading to insecure practices.…

Honeywords are decoy passwords that can be added to a credential database; if a login attempt uses a honeyword, this indicates that the site's credential database has been leaked. In this paper we explore the basic requirements for…

Using English words as passwords have been a popular topic in the last few years. The following article discusses a study to compare self-selection of the system-generated words for recognition and self-generated words for recall for nouns…

Security questions are one of the techniques used to recover passwords. The main limitation of security questions is that users find strong answers difficult to remember. This leads users to trade-off security for the convenience of an…

A partial password is a mode of password-based authentication that is widely used, especially in the financial sector. It is based on a challenge-response protocol, where at each login attempt, a challenge requesting characters from…