Patient Preferences for Authentication and Security: A Comparison Study of Younger and Older Patients

We examine authentication and security preferences of younger versus older patients in the healthcare domain. Previous research has investigated users\u27 perception of the acceptability of various forms of authentication in nonhealthcare domains, but not patients’ preferences. First, we developed an interactive prototype to test three authentication methods: passwords, pattern, and voice. Our results indicate that younger patients prefer passwords by a significant margin. Older patients indicated more mixed preferences. In addition, we evaluated the level of security patients desired for protection of health information compared to financial information. We found no difference based on age: both groups felt financial security is more important than health data security. The findings of this research can be used to improve and enhance usability of future PHRs and overall PHR usage by patients. While this study is specific to cardiology patients we believe the results are generalizable to all patients with chronic conditions

Dictionary Attacks and Password Selection

Passwords, particularly text-based, are the most common authentication mechanisms across all platforms and services like computers, mobiles, web and network services. Existing password strength evaluators and online service providers (Gmail, Yahoo, Paypal, Twitter, etc) password strength estimators determine the effectiveness of passwords chosen by user based on entropy techniques or a similar function of the parameters: length, complexity and predictability. Such implementations often ignore passwords part of publicly available password dictionaries and password leaks which are often the primary choice for malicious adversaries and particularly script kiddies. This paper presents an application that would help in preventing the use of such passwords thereby reducing the impact of dictionary based password attacks significantly. The application maintains a database of unique passwords by gathering publicly available password dictionaries and passwords leaked over the Internet. The application provides users with an interface to query the database and verify if their passwords are already available on the Internet thereby preventing them from the use of such passwords

Analysis of real-world passwords for social media sites

Textual passwords have dominated all other entity authentication mechanisms since they were introduced in the early 1960’s. Despite an inherent weakness against social engineering, keylogging, shoulder surfing, dictionary, and brute-force attacks, password authentication continues to grow as the Internet expands. Existing research on password authentication proves that dictionary attacks are successful because users make poor choices when creating passwords. To make passwords easier to remember, users select character strings that are shorter in length and contain memorable content, like personal identity information, common words found in a dictionary, backward spellings of common words, recognizable sequences, and easily guessed mnemonic phrases. A number of these studies identify weaknesses found in passwords on social media sites [1] [2] [3] [4] [5]. However, this body of work fails to explore whether users choose more secure passwords on accounts that protect their professional online identity than they choose on accounts that are used for personal entertainment. In this study, we first cracked passwords from the over 6.4 million unsalted, SHA-1 hashed passwords stolen from the professional, social media site, LinkedIn. Next, we analyzed the length, character set composition, and entropy score of the passwords recovered. Then, we compared our results to the analysis of passwords performed by Weir, et al. on the RockYou! dataset to determine whether professionals protecting their online presence chose wiser passwords than social media site users who play online games. In our analysis we found that the users of the professional, social media site, LinkedIn, chose more secure passwords than the users of the social media gaming site, RockYou!. LinkedIn passwords contained a greater percentage of numbers, special characters, and uppercase letters than RockYou!. We also found that the LinkedIn passwords utilized special characters more frequently, but RockYou! passwords applied special character less predictably

The Symbiosis between Collision and Preimage Resistance

We revisit the definitions of preimage resistance, focussing on the question of finding a definition that is simple enough to prove security against, yet flexible enough to be of use for most applications. We give an in-depth analysis of existing preimage resistance notions, introduce several new notions, and establish relations and separations between the known and new preimage notions. This establishes a clear separation between domain-oriented and range-oriented preimage resistance notions. For the former an element is chosen from the domain and hashed to form the target digest; for the latter the target digest is chosen directly from the range. In particular, we show that Rogaway and Shrimpton’s notion of everywhere preimage resistance on its own is less powerful than previously thought. However, we prove that in conjunction with collision resistance, everywhere preimage resistance implies ‘ordinary’ (domain-based) preimage resistance. We show the implications of our result for iterated hash functions and hash chains, where the latter is related to the Winternitz one-time signature scheme.status: publishe

An investigation of the security of passwords derived from African languages

Password authentication has become ubiquitous in the cyber age. To-date, there have been several studies on country based passwords by authors who studied, amongst others, English, Finnish, Italian and Chinese based passwords. However, there has been a lack of focused study on the type of passwords that are being created in Africa and whether there are benefits in creating passwords in an African language. For this research, password databases containing LAN Manager (LM) and NT LAN Manager (NTLM) hashes extracted from South African organisations in a variety of sectors in the economy, were obtained to gain an understanding of user behaviour in creating passwords. Analysis of the passwords obtained from these hashes (using several cracking methods) showed that many organisational passwords are based on the English language. This is understandable considering that the business language in South Africa is English even though South Africa has 11 official languages. African language based passwords were derived from known English weak passwords and some of the passwords were appended with numbers and special characters. The African based passwords created using eight Southern African languages were then uploaded to the Internet to test the security around using passwords based on African languages. Since most of the passwords were able to be cracked by third party researchers, we conclude that any password that is derived from known weak English words marked no improvement in the security of a password written in an African language, especially the more widely spoken languages, namely, isiZulu, isiXhosa and Setswana

Advantages of application of Electronic Commerce in procurement for the Armed Forces of Brazil and South Korea

This thesis examines the prospects for international implementation of E-Commerce (EC) in the contexts of the armed forces of Brazil and South Korea. It describes the functions, roles and infrastructure of EC technology. It weighs the advantages and disadvantages of E-Commerce. Particular attention is paid to legal issues, electronic funds transfer and on-line reverse auctions. An E-Commerce implementation plan is presented, benchmarked on the experience of the United States military in using EC to reduce costs and enhance readiness. This plan includes measures of organizational outcomes to evaluate the success of an EC implementation.http://archive.org/details/advantagesofppli10945100

Selecting Secure Passwords

Item does not contain fulltextTopics in Cryptology – CT-RSA 200

Increasing the security of gaze-based cued-recall graphical passwords using saliency masks

With computers being used ever more ubiquitously in situations where privacy is important, secure user authentication is a central requirement. Gaze-based graphical passwords are a particularly promising means for shoulder-surfing-resistant authentication, but selecting secure passwords remains challenging. In this paper, we present a novel gaze-based authentication scheme that makes use of cued-recall graphical passwords on a single image. In order to increase password security, our approach uses a computational model of visual attention to mask those areas of the image that are most likely to attract visual attention. We create a realistic threat model for attacks that may occur in public settings, such as filming the user's interaction while drawing money from an ATM. Based on a 12-participant user study, we show that our approach is significantly more secure than a standard image-based authentication and gaze-based 4-digit PIN entry