Metrics of password management policy

Abstract

The necessity to management the computer security of an institution implies an evaluation phase and the most common method to carry out this evaluation it consists on the use of a set of metrics. As any system of information needs of an authentication mechanism being the most used one those based on password, in this article we propose a set of metric of password management policies based on the most outstanding factors in this authentication mechanism. Together with the metrics, we propose a quality indicator derived from these metrics that allows us to have a global vision of the quality of the password management policy used and a complete example of calculation of the proposed metric. Finally, we will indicate the future works to be performed to check the validity and usefulness of the proposed metrics. © Springer-Verlag Berlin Heidelberg 2006.