Character Strings, Memory and Passwords: What a Recall Study Can Tell Us

摘要: Many users must authenticate to multiple systems and applications, often using different passwords, on a daily basis. At the same time, recommendations of security experts are driving increases in required character length complexity passwords. The thinking is that longer passwords will result greater "entropy," or randomness, making them more difficult guess. requires inclusion upper- lower-case letters, numerals, special characters. How interact cope with topic significant interest both computer science cognitive research communities. Using experimental methodology from behavioral sciences, we set out answer following question: how memorable complex strings lengths might be used as higher-entropy passwords? In this experiment, participants were asked memorize series ten type repeatedly into program. Character string varied random characters made up alphanumeric order mimic Not surprisingly, our findings indicate is, it takes for person recall it, likely they make an error when trying re-type string. These effects particularly pronounced eight longer.