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Record W2157676816 · doi:10.1109/pst.2013.6596062

Writing down your password: Does it help?

2013· article· en· W2157676816 on OpenAlex

Why this work is in the frame

A frame that forgets how it found something cannot be audited. These are the routes that admitted this work.

affAt least one author lists a Canadian institution in the pinned OpenAlex snapshot.
fundA Canadian funder is recorded on the work.

Bibliographic record

Venuenot available
Typearticle
Languageen
FieldComputer Science
TopicUser Authentication and Security Systems
Canadian institutionsCarleton University
FundersNatural Sciences and Engineering Research Council of CanadaCanada Research Chairs
KeywordsPasswordMemorizationComputer scienceCognitive passwordPassword policyS/KEYComputer securityLoginPassword crackingPassword strengthInternet privacyPhoneAuthentication (law)One-time passwordPsychologyCognitive psychology

Abstract

fetched live from OpenAlex

Users are able to remember their phone numbers and postal codes, their student numbers, PIN numbers, and social insurance numbers. Why, then, do users have trouble remembering their passwords? This paper considers the hypothesis that being able to access written notes when needed would eventually help users to memorize the password. Further we hypothesize that writing down passwords encourages the use of passwords that are more complex than their unwritten (memorized) counterparts. We surveyed 31 participants on their opinions and experiences with writing down passwords and tested whether these participants created more complex passwords when they were encouraged to write them down. Finally, we observed whether written passwords had higher login success rates when tested again at least one week later. Results indicate that regardless of the experimental condition, users preferred to memorize their passwords than to take the extra step of referring to their written notes. Additionally, memorized and written passwords were remembered equally well. Finally, we found that users who had difficulty logging in had passwords with significantly higher mean entropy, which confirms the heuristic that complex passwords are harder to remember. We also unexpectedly found that users password habits are so strongly ingrained that they often ignored our instructions about writing or memorizing their password and continued to use their preestablished strategy. This observation is noteworthy for anyone conducting user authentication research.

Fetched live from OpenAlex and de-inverted. Abstracts are not stored in this database: the inverted indexes are 8.6 GB of the frame’s 9.3 GB of text, and the host has 13 GB free.

Full frame distilled prediction

Teacher imitation

Not calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. Learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and 10,348 direct Gemma labels. Candidate is the union of thresholded teacher heads; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels or direct frontier model labels.

metaresearch head score (Codex)0.000
metaresearch head score (Gemma)0.000
Version: codex-gemma-dda1882f352aValidation status: machine_predicted_unvalidated
Candidate categoriesInsufficient payload (model declined to judge)
Consensus categoriesnone
DomainCandidate signal: none · Consensus signal: none
Study designCandidate signal: Simulation or modeling · Consensus signal: none
GenreCandidate signal: Empirical · Consensus signal: none
Teacher disagreement score0.637
Threshold uncertainty score0.998

Codex and Gemma teacher scores by category

CategoryCodexGemma
Metaresearch0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (narrow)0.0000.000
Meta-epidemiology (broad)0.0000.000
Bibliometrics0.0000.000
Science and technology studies0.0000.000
Scholarly communication0.0000.001
Open science0.0010.000
Research integrity0.0000.000
Insufficient payload (model declined to judge)0.0010.003

Machine scores (provisional)

The two teacher heads of the student model, read on this work. A score orders the frame for review; it never asserts a category, and the validation status ships verbatim with every row.

Baseline scores from an immature model (maturity gate not passed, 7 training rounds). Scores rank; they never assert a category.

Opus teacher head0.020
GPT teacher head0.253
Teacher spread0.233 · how far apart the two teachers sit on this one work
Validation statusscore_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from it

Quick stats

Citations9
Published2013
Admission routes2
Has abstractyes

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