Nudging folks towards stronger password choices:providing certainty is the key

Persuading people to choose strong passwords is challenging. One way to influence password strength, as and when people are making the choice, is to tweak the choice architecture to encourage stronger choice. A variety of choice architecture manipulations i.e. “nudges”, have been trialled by researchers with a view to strengthening the overall password profile. None has made much of a difference so far. Here we report on our design of an influential behavioural intervention tailored to the password choice context: a hybrid nudge that significantly prompted stronger passwords.We carried out three longitudinal studies to analyse the efficacy of a range of “nudges” by manipulating the password choice architecture of an actual university web application. The first and second studies tested the efficacy of several simple visual framing “nudges”. Password strength did not budge. The third study tested expiration dates directly linked to password strength. This manipulation delivered a positive result: significantly longer and stronger passwords. Our main conclusion was that the final successful nudge provided participants with absolute certainty as to the benefit of a stronger password, and that it was this certainty that made the difference

Lessons learned from evaluating eight password nudges in the wild

Background. The tension between security and convenience, when creating passwords, is well established. It is a tension that often leads users to create poor passwords. For security designers, three mitigation strategies exist: issuing passwords, mandating minimum strength levels or encouraging better passwords. The first strategy prompts recording, the second reuse, but the third merits further investigation. It seemed promising to explore whether users could be subtly nudged towards stronger passwords.Aim. The aim of the study was to investigate the influence of visual nudges on self-chosen password length and/or strength.Method. A university application, enabling students to check course dates and review grades, was used to support two consecutive empirical studies over the course of two academic years. In total, 497 and 776 participants, respectively, were randomly assigned either to a control or an experimental group. Whereas the control group received no intervention, the experimental groups were presented with different visual nudges on the registration page of the web application whenever passwords were created. The experimental groups’ password strengths and lengths were then compared that of the control group.Results. No impact of the visual nudges could be detected, neither in terms of password strength nor length. The ordinal score metric used to calculate password strength led to a decrease in variance and test power, so that the inability to detect an effect size does not definitively indicate that such an effect does not exist.Conclusion. We cannot conclude that the nudges had no effect on password strength. It might well be that an actual effect was not detected due to the experimental design choices. Another possible explanation for our result is that password choice is influenced by the user’s task, cognitive budget, goals and pre-existing routines. A simple visual nudge might not have the power to overcome these forces. Our lessons learned therefore recommend the use of a richer password strength quantification measure, and the acknowledgement of the user’s context, in future studies

Why Do Developers Get Password Storage Wrong? A Qualitative Usability Study

Passwords are still a mainstay of various security systems, as well as the cause of many usability issues. For end-users, many of these issues have been studied extensively, highlighting problems and informing design decisions for better policies and motivating research into alternatives. However, end-users are not the only ones who have usability problems with passwords! Developers who are tasked with writing the code by which passwords are stored must do so securely. Yet history has shown that this complex task often fails due to human error with catastrophic results. While an end-user who selects a bad password can have dire consequences, the consequences of a developer who forgets to hash and salt a password database can lead to far larger problems. In this paper we present a first qualitative usability study with 20 computer science students to discover how developers deal with password storage and to inform research into aiding developers in the creation of secure password systems

Secure and Usable User Authentication

Authentication is a ubiquitous task in users\u27 daily lives. The dominant form of user authentication are text passwords. They protect private accounts like online banking, gaming, and email, but also assets in organisations. Yet, many issues are associated with text passwords, leading to challenges faced by both, users and organisations. This thesis contributes to the body of research enabling secure and usable user authentication, benefiting both, users and organisations. To that end, it addresses three distinct challenges. The first challenge addressed in this thesis is the creation of correct, complete, understandable, and effective password security awareness materials. To this end, a systematic process for the creation of awareness materials was developed and applied to create a password security awareness material. This process comprises four steps. First, relevant content for an initial version is aggregated (i.e. descriptions of attacks on passwords and user accounts, descriptions of defences to these attacks, and common misconceptions about password and user account security). Then, feedback from information security experts is gathered to ensure the correctness and completeness of the awareness material. Thereafter, feedback from lay-users is gathered to ensure the understandability of the awareness material. Finally, a formal evaluation of the awareness material is conducted to ensure its effectiveness (i.e. whether the material improves participant\u27s ability to assess the security of passwords as well as password-related behaviour and decreases the prevalence of common misconceptions about password and user account security). The results of the evaluation show the effectiveness of the awareness material: it significantly improved the participants\u27 ability to assess the security of password-related behaviour as well as passwords and significantly decreased the prevalence of misconceptions about password and user account security. The second challenge addressed in this thesis is shoulder-surfing resistant text password entry with gamepads (as an example of very constrained input devices) in shared spaces. To this end, the very first investigation of text password entry with gamepads is conducted. First, the requirements of authentication in the gamepad context are described. Then, these requirements are applied to assess schemes already deployed in the gamepad context and shoulder-surfing resistant authentication schemes from the literature proposed for non-gamepad contexts. The results of this assessment show that none of the currently deployed and only four of the proposals in the literature fulfil all requirements. Furthermore, the results of the assessment also indicate a need for an empirical evaluation in order to exactly gauge the shoulder-surfing threat in the gamepad context and compare alternatives to the incumbent on-screen keyboard. Based on these results, two user studies (one online study and one lab study) are conducted to investigate the shoulder-surfing resistance and usability of three authentication schemes in the gamepad context: the on-screen keyboard (as de-facto standard in this context), the grid-based scheme (an existing proposal from the literature identified as the most viable candidate adaptable to the gamepad context during the assessment), and Colorwheels (a novel shoulder-surfing resistant authentication scheme specifically designed for the gamepad context). The results of these two user studies show that on-screen keyboards are highly susceptible to opportunistic shoulder-surfing, but also show the most favourable usability properties among the three schemes. Colorwheels offers the most robust shoulder-surfing resistance and scores highest with respect to participants\u27 intention to use it in the future, while showing more favourable usability results than the grid-based scheme. The third challenge addressed in this thesis is secure and efficient storage of passwords in portfolio authentication schemes. Portfolio authentication is used to counter capture attacks such as shoulder-surfing or eavesdropping on network traffic. While usability studies of portfolio authentication schemes showed promising results, a verification scheme which allows secure and efficient storage of the portfolio authentication secret had been missing until now. To remedy this problem, the (t,n)-threshold verification scheme is proposed. It is based on secret sharing and key derivation functions. The security as well as the efficiency properties of two variants of the scheme (one based on Blakley secret sharing and one based on Shamir secret sharing) are evaluated against each other and against a naive approach. These evaluations show that the two (t,n)-threshold verification scheme variants always exhibit more favourable properties than the naive approach and that when deciding between the two variants, the exact application scenario must be considered. Three use cases illustrate as exemplary application scenarios the versatility of the proposed (t,n)-threshold verification scheme. By addressing the aforementioned three distinct challenges, this thesis demonstrates the breadth of the field of usable and secure user authentication ranging from awareness materials, to the assessment and evaluation of authentication schemes, to applying cryptography to craft secure password storage solutions. The research processes, results, and insights described in this thesis represent important and meaningful contributions to the state of the art in the research on usable and secure user authentication, offering benefits for users, organisations, and researchers alike

Capturing and Analyzing Network Traffic from Common Mobile Devices for Security and Privacy

Mobile devices such as tablets and smartphones are becoming more common, and they are holding more information. This includes private information such as contacts, financial data, and passwords. At the same time these devices have network capability with access to the Internet being a prime feature. Little research has been done in observing the network traffic produced by these mobile devices. To determine if private information was being transmitted without user knowledge, the mobile capture lab and a set of procedures have been created to observe, capture and analyze the network traffic produced by mobile devices. The effectiveness of the lab and procedures has been evaluated with the analysis of four common mobile devices. The data analyzed from the case studies indicates that, contrary to popular opinion, very little private information is transmitted in clear text by mobile devices without the user’s knowledge

Simple Nudges for Better Password Creation

Recent security breaches have highlighted the consequences of reusing passwords across online accounts. Recent guidance on password policies by the UK government recommend an emphasis on password length over an extended character set for generating secure but memorable passwords without cognitive overload. This paper explores the role of three nudges in creating website-specific passwords: financial incentive (present vs absent), length instruction (long password vs no instruction) and stimulus (picture present vs not present). Mechanical Turk workers were asked to create a password in one of these conditions and the resulting passwords were evaluated based on character length, resistance to automated guessing attacks, and time taken to create the password. We found that users created longer passwords when asked to do so or when given a financial incentive and these longer passwords were harder to guess than passwords created with no instruction. Using a picture nudge to support password creation did not lead to passwords that were either longer or more resistant to attacks but did lead to account-specific passwords

A Human-Cognitive Perspective of Users’ Password Choices in Recognition-Based Graphical Authentication

Graphical password composition is an important part of graphical user authentication which affects the strength of the chosen password. Considering that graphical authentication is associated with visual search, perception, and information retrieval, in this paper we report on an eye-tracking study (N = 109) that aimed to investigate the effects of users’ cognitive styles toward the strength of the created passwords and shed light into whether and how the visual strategy of the users during graphical password composition is associated with the passwords’ strength. For doing so, we adopted Witkin’s Field Dependence-Independence theory, which underpins individual differences in visual information and cognitive processing, as graphical password composition tasks are associated with visual search. The analysis revealed that users with different cognitive processing characteristics followed different patterns of visual behavior during password composition which affected the strength of the created passwords. The findings underpin the need of considering human-cognitive characteristics as a design factor in graphical password schemes. The paper concludes by discussing implications for improving recognition-based graphical passwords through adaptation and personalization techniques based on individual cognitive characteristics

How Students Deal With Password Security: Case Study of Nalut University Students

University students are the largest segment of society that uses modern technology, represented by computers and smart phones, and to ensure the security and integrity of information, students must consider the most common protection methods for conducting the electronic authentication process. This research seeks to evaluate the extent of awareness of Nalut University students about password policies. The size of the study sample was (539) students, and the average age of the sample was (between 18 and 20 years) out of 2177 students. The questionnaire was analyzed using the statistical analysis program SPSS, version (26). The results of the study showed that the level of awareness among Nalut University students was low, as their percentage was 49.8%. It was found that there is a relationship between gender and password policy among university students, where the p value was = 0.01