Leveraging real-life facts to make random passwords more memorable

Abstract

User-chosen passwords fail to provide adequate security. System-assigned random passwords are more secure but suffer from memorability problems. We argue that the system should remove this burden from users by assisting with the memorization of randomly assigned passwords. To meet this need, we aim to apply the scientific understanding of long-term memory. In particular, we examine the efficacy of augmenting a system-assigned password scheme based on textual recognition by providing users with verbal cues—real-life facts corresponding to the assigned keywords. In addition, we explore the usability gain of including images related to the keywords along with the verbal cues. We conducted a multi-session in-lab user study with 52 participants, where each participant was assigned three different passwords, each representing one study condition. Our results show that the textual recognition-based scheme offering verbal cues had a significantly higher login success rate (94 %) as compared to the control condition, i.e., textual recognition without verbal cues (61 %). The comparison between textual and graphical recognition reveals that when users were provided with verbal cues, adding images did not significantly improve the login success rate, but it did lead to faster recognition of the assigned keywords. We believe that our findings make an important contribution to understanding the extent to which different types of cues impact the usability of system-assigned passwords.