Factors Influencing Password Reuse: A Case Study

Abbott, Jacob; Calarco, Daniel; Camp, L. Jean

doi:10.2139/ssrn.3142270

Cited by 5 publications

(12 citation statements)

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“…The commonly suggested ones in the related literature include: g1. Avoiding words that reference personal life (Abbott et al, 2018); g2. Using a combination of upper and lowercase letter, numbers, and special characters (Zhang-Kennedy et al, 2016;Abbott et al, 2018); g3.…”

Section: Related Work Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

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User perceptions and use of authentication methods: insights from youth in Mexico and Bosnia and Herzegovina

Hadžidedić

Fajardo-Flores

Ramić-Brkić

2022

ICS

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Purpose This paper aims to address the user perspective about usability, security and use of five authentication schemes (text and graphical passwords, biometrics and hardware tokens) from a population not covered previously in the literature. Additionally, this paper explores the criteria users apply in creating their text passwords. Design/methodology/approach An online survey study was performed in spring 2019 with university students in Mexico and Bosnia and Herzegovina. A total of 197 responses were collected. Findings Fingerprint-based authentication was most frequently perceived as usable and secure. However, text passwords were the predominantly used method for unlocking computer devices. The participants preferred to apply personal criteria for creating text passwords, which, interestingly, coincided with the general password guidelines, e.g. length, combining letters and special characters. Originality/value Research on young adults’ perceptions of different authentication methods is driven by the increasing frequency and sophistication of security breaches, as well as their significant consequences. This study provided insight into the commonly used authentication methods among youth from two geographic locations, which have not been accounted for previously.

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Section: Related Work Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

“…Avoiding words that reference personal life (Abbott et al, 2018); g2. Using a combination of upper and lowercase letter, numbers, and special characters (Zhang-Kennedy et al, 2016;Abbott et al, 2018); g3. Setting the minimum length to eight characters (Zhang-Kennedy et al, 2016;Abbott et al, 2018); g4.…”

Section: Related Work Reviewmentioning

confidence: 99%

User perceptions and use of authentication methods: insights from youth in Mexico and Bosnia and Herzegovina

Hadžidedić

Fajardo-Flores

Ramić-Brkić

2022

ICS

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“…In current society, the required number of passwords or protected accounts with a password is growing increasingly. This cause's limitation to human memory capacity and capability to remember a multitude of passwords; thus, this behaviour tends to lead to the symptom of password reuse [21]. Password reuse brings on a form of security weakness and vulnerability as it enables intruders or attackers who have successfully compromised or exploited one of the victim's passwords.…”

Section: Common Password Usementioning

confidence: 99%

“…Thus, therefore this study proposes following hypothesis: H2: Easy to guess password dictionary has a significant positive impact on personal data breach Das et al [22] studied the password strategies for end-users who appeared or surfaced in multiple related credential leaks and estimated that 43% of passwords were re-used [22]. The research on the impact of password reuse across multiple sites and its weak practices leading towards security or personal data breaches was done by comparing same password reuse across 21 top universities in the United States [21]. An empirical study done on larger domino effects of password reuse has bigger implications.…”

Section: Hypothesis Developmentmentioning

confidence: 99%

The Effect of Bad Password Habits on Personal Data Breach

Dastane

2020

IJETER

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Users tend to utilize bad or weak passwords with memorable characteristics such as simple words from the dictionary and easy to remember sequence of numbers from birthdays. Poor or bad password habits lead to compromise of personal data privacy and allow hackers to gain unauthorised access to these passwords and use them for criminal and fraudulent cyber activities. The purpose of this research is to examine the impact of password habits among Malaysians on their personal data breaches. This study provides insights into the behaviour of users concerning their passwords use. This study used a positivism paradigm and applied a quantitative approach and used a convenience sampling technique to collect data from 297 respondents from Malaysian nationals. IBM SPSS AMOS 24 is used to conduct the analysis. The result from the study shows that "lacking the use of second-factor authentication' have a significant and a positive impact on the personal data breaches. Based on this finding, it can be concluded that the lack of second-factor authentication is an essential factor that significantly impacts personal data breach. This finding provides a different perspective from the usual connection of bad password habits of weak password length and combination, easy to guess the password and common password reuse to be the main contributing factor of the personal data breaches by the previous literature. The contribution of this research is the provision of empirical evidence that emphasise the need to continually beef up own security by correctly using second-factor authentication across individual accounts. Doing so is crucial to curb personal data breaches.

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“…Researchers have measured password-related behaviors in a variety of ways, e.g., by asking participants to install password-logging tools [17,44] and analyzing breached passwords from publicly posted lists [6,13] or privately collected datasets [30]. We leverage data collected through the Security Behavior Observatory (SBO) (see Section 3), which captures detailed, real-world behavior of home computer users by instrumenting their operating systems and web browsers [18,19,35].…”

Section: Password-related Behaviorsmentioning

confidence: 99%

(How) Do people change their passwords after a breach?

Bhagavatula,

Bauer,

Kapadia

2020

Preprint

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To protect against misuse of passwords compromised in a breach, consumers should promptly change affected passwords and any similar passwords on other accounts. Ideally, affected companies should strongly encourage this behavior and have mechanisms in place to mitigate harm. In order to make recommendations to companies about how to help their users perform these and other security-enhancing actions after breaches, we must first have some understanding of the current effectiveness of companies' post-breach practices. To study the effectiveness of password-related breach notifications and practices enforced after a breach, we examinebased on real-world password data from 249 participantswhether and how constructively participants changed their passwords after a breach announcement.Of the 249 participants, 63 had accounts on breached domains; only 33% of the 63 changed their passwords and only 13% (of 63) did so within three months of the announcement. New passwords were on average 1.3× stronger than old passwords (when comparing log 10 -transformed strength), though most were weaker or of equal strength. Concerningly, new passwords were overall more similar to participants' other passwords, and participants rarely changed passwords on other sites even when these were the same or similar to their password on the breached domain. Our results highlight the need for more rigorous password-changing requirements following a breach and more effective breach notifications that deliver comprehensive advice.

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Factors Influencing Password Reuse: A Case Study

Cited by 5 publications

References 0 publications

User perceptions and use of authentication methods: insights from youth in Mexico and Bosnia and Herzegovina

User perceptions and use of authentication methods: insights from youth in Mexico and Bosnia and Herzegovina

The Effect of Bad Password Habits on Personal Data Breach

(How) Do people change their passwords after a breach?

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