Simple Nudges for Better Password Creation

Abstract

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 Study on Priming Methods for Graphical Passwords

“…Surprisingly, our results indicate that the positive impact of priming techniques on password security is more pronounced on the images with low security potential (e.g, having a single dense saliency region). Our analyses shed light into the challenges of designing effective priming techniques in graphical passwords, in line with related research for text passwords [29,31].…”