Evaluating the Usability of a Multilingual Passphrase Policy

The literature shows that users struggle to generate secure passwords. This has led to systems administrators implementing password expiry policies that burden and frustrate users. This study explores the security and usability of a multilingual passphrase policy, as multilingualism has the potential to enhance security. A total of 224 participants were invited to participate in an experiment to generate and recall short passwords and multilingual passphrases. The findings of this study show that, although a multilingual passphrase policy made passphrase generation slightly more difficult, its use motivated users to generate unique memorable passphrases. Arguably, repeated use of passphrases promotes memorability and cognitive fluency. Furthermore, the multilingual passphrases in this study proved to be stronger than those reported in the literature

A model for secure and usable passphrases for multilingual users

Research on more than 100 million passwords that have been leaked to the public domain has uncovered various security limitations associated with user-generated short passwords. Long passwords (passphrases) are considered an alternative solution that could provide a balance between security and usability. However, the literature shows a lack of consistency in the security and usability contributions of passphrases. For example, studies that investigated passphrase security focusing on structural dependencies at character level found passphrases to be secure. Inversely, other research findings suggest that passphrase security could be compromised by the use of predictable grammatical rules, popular words in a natural language and keyboard patterns. This is further exacerbated by research on passphrases that is focused on the Global North. This is a huge concern given that results from inter-cultural studies suggest that local languages do influence password structure and to some extent, password usability and security. To address these gaps in the literature, this study used socio-technical theory which emphasised both the social and technical aspects of the phenomenon under study. Psychological studies show that the memory has limited capacity, something that threatens password usability; hence, the need to utilise information that is already known during password generation. Socio-cultural theory suggests that the information that is already known by users is contextually informed, hence sociocultural theory was applied to understand the contextual factors that could be used to enhance passphrase security and usability. With reference to the Southern African context, this study argues that system designers should take advantage of a multilingual user group and encourage the generation of passphrases that are based on substrings from different languages. This study went on to promote the use of multilingual passphrases instead of emphasising multi-character class passwords. This study was guided by design science research. Participants were invited to take part in a short password and multilingual passphrase generation and recall experiment that was made available using a web-based application. These passwords were generated by participants under pre-specified conditions. Quantitative and qualitative data was gathered. The study findings showed the use of both African and Indo-European languages in multilingual passphrases and short passwords. English oriented passwords and substrings dominated the multilingual passphrase and short password corpora. In addition, some of the short passwords and substrings in the multilingual passphrase corpora were found among the most common passwords of 2016, 2017 and 2018. Usability tests showed that multilingual passphrases are usable, even though they were not easy to create and recall when compared to short passwords. A high rate of password reuse during short password generation by participants might have worked in favour of short passwords. Nonetheless, participants appear to reflect better usability with multilingual passphrases over time due to repeated use. Females struggled to recall short passwords and multilingual passphrases when compared to their male counterparts. Security tests using the Probabilistic Context-Free Grammar suggest that short passwords are weaker, with just more than 50% of the short passwords being guessed, while none 4 Final Submission of Thesis, Dissertation or Research Report/Project, Conference or Exam Paper of the multilingual passphrases were guessed. Further analysis showed that short passwords that were oriented towards an IndoEuropean language were more easily guessed than African language-oriented short passwords. As such, this study encourages orienting passwords towards African languages while the use of multilingual passphrases is expected to offer more security. The use of African languages and multilingual passphrases by a user group that is biased towards English-oriented passwords could enhance security by increasing the search space

Passphrase and keystroke dynamics authentication: security and usability

It was found that employees spend a total 2.25 days within a 60 day period on password related activities. Another study found that over 85 days an average user will create 25 accounts with an average of 6.5 unique passwords. These numbers are expected to increase over time as more systems become available. In addition, the use of 6.5 unique passwords highlight that passwords are being reused which creates security concerns as multiple systems will be accessible by an unauthorised party if one of these passwords is leaked. Current user authentication solutions either increase security or usability. When security increases, usability decreases, or vice versa. To add to this, stringent security protocols encourage unsecure behaviours by the user such as writing the password down on a piece of paper to remember it. It was found that passphrases require less cognitive effort than passwords and because passphrases are stronger than passwords, they don’t need to be changed as frequently as passwords. This study aimed to assess a two-tier user authentication solution that increases security and usability. The proposed solution uses passphrases in conjunction with keystroke dynamics to address this research problem. The design science research approach was used to guide this study. The study’s theoretical foundation includes three theories. The Shannon entropy formula was used to calculate the strength of passwords, passphrases and keystroke dynamics. The chunking theory assisted in assessing password and passphrase memorisation issues and the keystroke-level model was used to assess password and passphrase typing issues. Two primary data collection methods were used to evaluate the findings and to ensure that gaps in the research were filled. A login assessment experiment collected data on user authentication and user-system interaction for passwords and passphrases. Plus, an expert review was conducted to verify findings and assess the research artefact in the form of a model. The model can be used to assist with the implementation of a two-tier user authentication solution which involves passphrases and keystroke dynamics. There are a number of components that need to be considered to realise the benefits of this solution and ensure successful implementation

A practical application of a text-independent speaker authentication system on mobile devices

The growing market of mobile devices forces to question about how to protect users’ credentials and data stored on such devices. Authentication mechanisms remain the first layer of security in the use of mobile devices. However, several of such mechanisms that have been already proposed were designed in a machine point of view. As a matter of fact, they are not compatible with behaviors human have while using their mobile devices in the daily life. Consequently, users adopted unsafe habits that may compromise the proper functioning of authentication mechanisms according to the safety aspect. The first main objective of this research project is to highlight strengths and weaknesses of current authentication systems, from the simpler ones such as PIN (Personal Identification Number) to the more complex biometric systems such as fingerprint. Then, this thesis offers an exhaustive evaluation of existing schemes. For this evaluation, we rely on some existing criteria and we also propose some new ones. Suggested criteria are chiefly centered on the usability of these authentica-tion systems. Secondly, this thesis presents a practical implementation of a text-independent speaker au-thentication system for mobile devices. We place a special attention in the choice of algorithms with low-computational costs since we want that the system operates without any network communication. Indeed, the enrollment, as well as the identification process are achieved onto the device itself. To this end, our choice was based on the extraction of Linear Prediction Cepstral Coefficients (LPCCs) (Furui 1981; O'Shaughnessy 1988) to obtain relevant voice features and the Naïve Bayes classifier (Zhang 2004) to predict at which speaker a given utterance corresponds. Furthermore, the authenti-cation decision was enhanced in order to overcome misidentification. In that sense, we introduced the notion of access privileges (i.e. public, protected, private) that the user has to attribute to each appli-cation installed on his/her mobile device. Then, the safest authority is granted through the result of the speaker identification decision as well as the analysis of the user’s location and the presence of a headset. In order to evaluate the proposed authentication system, eleven participants were involved in the experiment, which was conducted in two different environments (i.e. quiet and noisy). Moreover, we also employed public speech corpuses to compare this implementation to existing methods. Results obtained have shown that our system is a relevant, accurate and efficient solution to authenticate users on their mobile devices. Considering acceptability issues which were pointed out by some users, we suggest that the proposed authentication system should be either employed as part of a multilayer authentication, or as a fallback mechanism, to cover most of the user needs and usages. La croissance du marché des dispositifs mobiles implique de se questionner au sujet de comment protéger l’identité ainsi que les données personnelles des utilisateurs qui sont stockées sur ces appareils. En ce sens, les mécanismes d’authentification demeurent la première couche de sécurité dans l’utilisation des mobiles. Cependant, il apparaît que la plupart des mécanismes d’authentification qui ont été proposés, ont été conçus suivant un point de vue orienté machine plutôt qu’humain. En effet, ceux-ci ne s’adaptent généralement pas avec l’usage quotidien qu’ont les utilisateurs lorsqu’ils se servent leur téléphone. En conséquence, ils ont adopté des habitudes dangereuses qui peuvent compromettre le bon fonctionnement des systèmes d’authentification. Celles-ci peuvent alors remettre en question la sécurité de leur identité ainsi que la confidentialité de leur contenu numérique. Le premier objectif principal de ce projet de recherche est de faire ressortir les forces et les faiblesses des méthodes d’authentification qui existent actuellement, des plus simples comme le NIP (Numéro d’Identification Personnel) aux solutions biométriques plus complexes comme l’empreinte digitale. Par la suite, ce mémoire offre une évaluation exhaustive de ces solutions, basée sur des critères existant ainsi que de nouveaux critères que nous suggérons. Ces derniers sont majoritairement centrés sur l’utilisabilité des mécanismes d’authentification qui ont été examinés. Dans un second temps, ce mémoire présente une implémentation pratique, pour périphériques mobiles, d’un système d’authentification d’orateur indépendant de ce qui est prononcé par l’utilisateur. Pour concevoir un tel système, nous avons porté une attention particulière dans le choix d’algorithmes admettant un faible temps d’exécution afin de se prémunir des communications réseau. En effet, ceci nous permet alors de réaliser le processus d’entraînement ainsi que la reconnaissance, directement sur le mobile. Les choix technologiques se sont arrêtés sur l’extraction de coefficients spectraux (Linear Prediction Cepstral Coefficients) (Furui 1981; O'Shaughnessy 1988) afin d’obtenir des caractéristiques vocales pertinentes, ainsi que sur une classification naïve bayésienne (Zhang 2004) pour prédire à quel utilisateur correspond un énoncé donné. La décision finale, quant à elle, a été améliorée afin de se prémunir des mauvaises identifications. En ce sens, nous avons introduit la notion de droits d’accès spécifiques (i.e. publique, protégé ou privé) que l’utilisateur doit attribuer à chacune des applications installées sur son mobile. Ensuite, l’autorisation d’accès la plus adaptée est accordée, grâce au résultat retournée par l’identification de l’orateur, ainsi que par l’analyse de la localisation de l’utilisateur et de l’emploi d’un micro-casque. Pour réaliser l’évaluation du système que nous proposons ici, onze participants ont été recrutés pour la phase d’expérimentation. Cette dernière a été menée dans deux types d’environnements différents (i.e. silencieux et bruyant). De plus, nous avons aussi exploité des corpus de voix publiques afin de comparer notre implémentation à celles qui ont été proposées par le passé. Par conséquent, les résultats que nous avons obtenus ont montré que notre système constitue une solution pertinente, précise et efficace pour authentifier les utilisateurs sur leurs périphériques mobiles. Compte tenu des problèmes d’acceptabilité qui ont été mis en avant par certains testeurs, nous suggérons qu’un tel système puisse être utilisé comme faisant part d’une authentification à plusieurs facteurs, mais aussi comme une solution de repli, en cas d’échec du mécanisme principal, afin de couvrir la majorité des besoins et des usages des utilisateurs

CAPTCHA Types and Breaking Techniques: Design Issues, Challenges, and Future Research Directions

The proliferation of the Internet and mobile devices has resulted in malicious bots access to genuine resources and data. Bots may instigate phishing, unauthorized access, denial-of-service, and spoofing attacks to mention a few. Authentication and testing mechanisms to verify the end-users and prohibit malicious programs from infiltrating the services and data are strong defense systems against malicious bots. Completely Automated Public Turing test to tell Computers and Humans Apart (CAPTCHA) is an authentication process to confirm that the user is a human hence, access is granted. This paper provides an in-depth survey on CAPTCHAs and focuses on two main things: (1) a detailed discussion on various CAPTCHA types along with their advantages, disadvantages, and design recommendations, and (2) an in-depth analysis of different CAPTCHA breaking techniques. The survey is based on over two hundred studies on the subject matter conducted since 2003 to date. The analysis reinforces the need to design more attack-resistant CAPTCHAs while keeping their usability intact. The paper also highlights the design challenges and open issues related to CAPTCHAs. Furthermore, it also provides useful recommendations for breaking CAPTCHAs

Seventh International Joint Conference on Electronic Voting

This volume contains papers presented at E-Vote-ID 2022, the Seventh International JointConference on Electronic Voting, held during October 4–7, 2022. This was the first in-personconference following the COVID-19 pandemic, and, as such, it was a very special event forthe community since we returned to the traditional venue in Bregenz, Austria. The E-Vote-IDconference resulted from merging EVOTE and Vote-ID, and 18 years have now elapsed sincethe first EVOTE conference in Austria.Since that conference in 2004, over 1500 experts have attended the venue, including scholars,practitioners, authorities, electoral managers, vendors, and PhD students. E-Vote-ID collectsthe most relevant debates on the development of electronic voting, from aspects relating tosecurity and usability through to practical experiences and applications of voting systems, alsoincluding legal, social, or political aspects, amongst others, turning out to be an importantglobal referent on these issues

Telemedicine

Telemedicine is a rapidly evolving field as new technologies are implemented for example for the development of wireless sensors, quality data transmission. Using the Internet applications such as counseling, clinical consultation support and home care monitoring and management are more and more realized, which improves access to high level medical care in underserved areas. The 23 chapters of this book present manifold examples of telemedicine treating both theoretical and practical foundations and application scenarios

Campus Communications Systems: Converging Technologies

This book is a rewrite of Campus Telecommunications Systems: Managing Change, a book that was written by ACUTA in 1995. In the past decade, our industry has experienced a thousand-fold increase in data rates as we migrated from 10 megabit links (10 million bits per second) to 10 gigabit links (10 billion bits per second), we have seen the National Telecommunications Policy completely revamped; we have seen the combination of voice, data, and video onto one network; and we have seen many of our service providers merge into larger corporations able to offer more diverse services. When this book was last written, A CUT A meant telecommunications, convergence was a mathematical term, triple play was a baseball term, and terms such as iPod, DoS, and QoS did not exist. This book is designed to be a communications primer to be used by new entrants into the field of communications in higher education and by veteran communications professionals who want additional information in areas other than their field of expertise. There are reference books and text books available on every topic discussed in this book if a more in-depth explanation is desired. Individual chapters were authored by communications professionals from various member campuses. This allowed the authors to share their years of experience (more years than many of us would care to admit to) with the community at large. Foreword Walt Magnussen, Ph.D. Preface Ron Kovac, Ph.D. 1 The Technology Landscape: Historical Overview . Walt Magnussen, Ph.D. 2 Emerging Trends and Technologies . Joanne Kossuth 3 Network Security . Beth Chancellor 4 Security and Disaster Planning and Management Marjorie Windelberg, Ph.D. 5 Student Services in a University Setting . Walt Magnussen, Ph.D. 6 Administrative Services David E. O\u27Neill 7 The Business Side of Information Technology George Denbow 8 The Role of Consultants . David C. Metz Glossary Michelle Narcavag

The Proceedings of 15th Australian Information Security Management Conference, 5-6 December, 2017, Edith Cowan University, Perth, Australia

Conference Foreword The annual Security Congress, run by the Security Research Institute at Edith Cowan University, includes the Australian Information Security and Management Conference. Now in its fifteenth year, the conference remains popular for its diverse content and mixture of technical research and discussion papers. The area of information security and management continues to be varied, as is reflected by the wide variety of subject matter covered by the papers this year. The papers cover topics from vulnerabilities in “Internet of Things” protocols through to improvements in biometric identification algorithms and surveillance camera weaknesses. The conference has drawn interest and papers from within Australia and internationally. All submitted papers were subject to a double blind peer review process. Twenty two papers were submitted from Australia and overseas, of which eighteen were accepted for final presentation and publication. We wish to thank the reviewers for kindly volunteering their time and expertise in support of this event. We would also like to thank the conference committee who have organised yet another successful congress. Events such as this are impossible without the tireless efforts of such people in reviewing and editing the conference papers, and assisting with the planning, organisation and execution of the conference. To our sponsors, also a vote of thanks for both the financial and moral support provided to the conference. Finally, thank you to the administrative and technical staff, and students of the ECU Security Research Institute for their contributions to the running of the conference