The Center for Education and Research in Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

The Center for Education and Research in
Information Assurance and Security (CERIAS)

Passwords and human memory

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[tags]passwords, human factors, general security[/tags]
Today, I found a pointer to this short news story: Password Security is Her Game.  Here’s a quote from that story:

Many users have half a dozen passwords to remember. That’s why the most common password is “password.” The usual solution is to write it down. But how secure is that? Practicality wins. The probability of remembering six passwords is not that great. Half the people who say they never write down their passwords need to have their passwords reset because of forgetting.

I wasn’t going to post anything else on passwords so soon, but this seemed particularly pertinent.  Plus, the researcher is a Purdue alumna. grin

Comments

Posted by Freelance writing specialist
on Saturday, July 15, 2006 at 03:09 AM

Actually, passwords are my weak point. I remember only passwords to my two email accounts and God knows how many I have of them. Your articles were of great use to me. I tried to write down my emails on stickers, but well - those writings did get lost in a number of other papers. so I hope the advice I gained from the articles will chnage the things.

Posted by Rick Miller
on Friday, August 25, 2006 at 03:13 AM

Hi - I had the same issue and more so as I get older. A friend turned me on to a little application called SecurePass which creates secure passwords to replace all my poor easy- to-remember ones, manages all these hard to remember passwords and provides easy one click log-in when I want to go to a password protected site. I never need to remember anything. It does take a few moments to set up all your password protected sites but once you are set up - you are good to go. You can simply highlight a site in the SecurePass menu and with one click it launches your browser, takes you to the site, automatically places your user ID and secure password into the appropriate location and BAM

Posted by PasswordMaker: safe, secure, simple, site-specific
on Wednesday, November 14, 2007 at 07:57 PM

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