The DOI matches its Crossref record; 2 of the 2 references it cites were found in a registry or an index.
Of passwords and people: measuring the effect of password-composition policies
Abstract
Text-based passwords are the most common mechanism for authenticating humans to computer systems. To prevent users from picking passwords that are too easy for an adversary to guess, system administrators adopt password-composition policies (e.g., requiring passwords to contain symbols and numbers). Unfortunately, little is known about the relationship between password-composition policies and the strength of the resulting passwords, or about the behavior of users (e.g., writing down passwords) in response to different policies. We present a large-scale study that investigates password strength, user behavior, and user sentiment across four password-composition policies. We characterize the predictability of passwords by calculating their entropy, and find that a number of commonly held beliefs about password composition and strength are inaccurate. We correlate our results with user behavior and sentiment to produce several recommendations for password-composition policies that result in strong passwords without unduly burdening users.
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Citations
Cites
Estimation of entropy and mutual information
Paninski, L. (2003) · Neural Computation · doi:10.1162/089976603321780272 · Cited by 1,442
Massey, J. L. (2002) · Proceedings of 1994 IEEE International Symposium on Information Theory · doi:10.1109/isit.1994.394764 · Cited by 463 · cited 1×
“Massey showed that entropy provides a lower bound on the expected number of guesses required to identify information; this result connects the entropy in passwords with an attacker’s ability to guess them using a bruteforce attack [9].”
Background
Cited by
Wang, D., Cheng, H., Wang, P., Huang, X., & Jian, G. (2017) · IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security · doi:10.1109/tifs.2017.2721359 · Cited by 499
The Tangled Web of Password Reuse
Das, A., Bonneau, J., Caesar, M., Borisov, N., & Wang, X. (2014) · Proceedings 2014 Network and Distributed System Security Symposium · doi:10.14722/ndss.2014.23357 · Cited by 437
Kelley, P. G., Komanduri, S., Mazurek, M. L., Shay, R., Vidas, T., Bauer, L., Christin, N., Cranor, L. F., & Lopez, J. (2012) · 2012 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy · doi:10.1109/sp.2012.38 · Cited by 397
Self-citation(2016) · Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security · Cited by 123
Studying the impact of managers on password strength and reuse
Lyastani, S. G., Schilling, M., Fahl, S., Bugiel, S., & Backes, M. (2017) · arXiv · doi:10.48550/arxiv.1712.08940 · Cited by 5
Metadata
- Authors
- Komanduri, S., Shay, R., Kelley, P. G., Mazurek, M. L., Bauer, L., Christin, N., Cranor, L. F., & Egelman, S.
- Venue
- Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems
- Publisher
- ACM
- Published
- 2011-05-07
- Pages
- 2595-2604
- OpenAlex
- W2113266120
- Cited by
- 345
- References
- 2
- FWCI
- 19.71
- Type
- conference paper
- Language
- en
- Open access
- closed
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- The paper
- Komanduri, S., Shay, R., Kelley, P. G., Mazurek, M. L., Bauer, L., Christin, N., Cranor, L. F., & Egelman, S. (2011). Of passwords and people: measuring the effect of password-composition policies. Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. https://doi.org/10.1145/1978942.1979321
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