PSV (Password security visualizer): From password checking to user education

Abstract

This paper presents the Password Security Visualizer (PSV), an interactive visualization system specifically designed for password security education. PSV can be seen as a reconfigurable “box” containing different proactive password checkers (PPCs) and visualizers of password security information, allowing it to be used like a “many in one” or “hybrid” PPC. PSV can provide many new features that do not exist in traditional PPCs, thus having a greater potential to achieve its goals of educating users. Using purely client-side Web-based technologies, we implemented a prototype of PSV as an open-source software tool on a 2-D animated canvas. To evaluate the actual performance of our implemented PSV prototype against traditional PPCs, we conducted a semi-structured interview involving 20 human participants. Our qualitative analysis of the results showed that PSV was considered the most informative and recommended by most participants as a good educational tool. To the best of our knowledge, PSV is the first system combining different PPCs together for user education, and the user study is the first of this kind on comparing educational effectiveness of different PPCs (and PPC-like password security tools such as PSV).