Children's Text Password Behaviors and Parental Advice

Abstract

With increasing use of technology and the Internet among children, it is imperative to understand how they create passwords to protect their personal information, and also the parental advice they get to create these passwords. To understand this, we conducted two studies. The first study was conducted with children ages 11 to 13 to understand their password practices. The second study was conducted with parents to understand their own password behaviors and the strategies they teach their children to create secure passwords. The results of the studies indicated that children between ages 11 to 13 create simple passwords but believe that these passwords are hard for a stranger to guess. We also found that parents are concerned about their child's safety, but parents who are more aware of security-related cues are more likely to create secure passwords and teach their children to do the same. I would also like to thank my thesis committee members for reading my thesis

Age-appropriate password “best practice” ontologies for early educators and parents

“…Most also used the 3 J o u r n a l P r e -p r o o f names of familiar items in their passwords. This suggests high guessability, and this is confirmed by Maqsood's [19] study with older children (aged 11-13). Read and Cassidy [20] report on a child shouting their password across a classroom, evidencing a lack of understanding of the need for password security.…”

“…Some notable studies have indeed focused on children's password behaviours and mental models of passwords. Most academic studies of under 18's understanding of cyber principles have focused on teenagers [18,19] yet some have indeed focused on younger children.…”