Mon, 24 May 2004

Password Memorability and Securability

Password selection has been a particular interest of mine for years: it never ceases to amaze me how many folks choose the names of children/pets/moms as their password, despite those being the most easily surmised by an attacker.

This fascinating little study debunks some of the "folk beliefs" about password selection, and confirms others. A good read, indeed.

Who would have thought that that something new could be said about how best to select passwords? Ross Andreson of Cambridge University and some of his colleages have performed new empirical studies and found some pretty non-intuitive results.

(link) [Slashdot]

/Technology | 0 writebacks | permanent link

comment...

 
Notes: If you put a <mailto:> link in the URL field your address will not be mangled: this could be a bad idea as your email address could be easily harvested by bots designed for SPAM. The comments field should now format correctly for line feeds and carriage returns: when you hit the 'Enter' or 'Return' keys in your comment it should break to a new line. The text should wrap cleanly. Please let me know if it doesn't. No HTML tags will pass through - entering links seems to be the main cause of comment SPAM. Also, please be sure that Javascript is enabled in your browser before attempting to post a writeback. Sorry for any inconvenience, but this really helps cut down on the amount of comment SPAM I have to deal with.
 
 Name:
 URL:(optional)
 Title: (optional)
 Comments:  
Save my Name and URL/Email for next time