PASSWORD PRACTICE : The effect of training on password practice

• Main Author: Ekström, Niklas
• Format: Others
• Language: English
• Published: Högskolan i Skövde, Institutionen för informationsteknologi 2015
• Subjects: Password; Lecture; Interviews; Experiment; Entropy; Computer Sciences; Datavetenskap (datalogi)
• Online Access: http://urn.kb.se/resolve?urn=urn:nbn:se:his:diva-11147

There are several concerning issues with passwords today; one of them being weak passwords, but password management also plays a big role e.g. when the users reuses passwords over several services or don't change their passwords on a regular basis. With the usage of passwords for several aspects of our daily lives comes the responsibility of trying to mitigate these issues, a role that often falls on to the users themselves. The usage of guidelines has proved helpful in this regard but still lacks important aspects. This paper suggests the usage of education in the form of a lecture to help with the problem. In this paper we conducted a study of password leaks, a literature analysis of the area around passwords and perform some qualitative interviews with different kinds of people with varying education and usage of passwords. The results from these studies will then lay the foundation for the lecture in the experiment part of the paper, two experiment groups will be used, one given a lecture as education on the matter and one control group not given any education. The study has showed that the usage of a lecture can help increase the entropy, average length of user‟s passwords. These results can be interpreted together with another study that did a similar experiment to that a lecture can be a more efficient way to teach users about passwords.