Geographic Hints for Passphrase Authentication
Bibliographic record
Abstract
We propose and study the use of geographic hints to aid memorability of passphrase-style authentication secrets. Geographic hints are map locations that are selected by the user at the time of passphrase creation, and shown to the user as a hint at the time of passphrase login. We implement the GeoHints system and analyze how geographic hints impact the usability and security of passphrase-style secrets in a multi-session user study (n=38). The study involved testing for multiple passphrase interference-each participant was asked to recall 4 distinct passphrases. Our study indicates that while geographic hints showed promise for reducing memory interference, GeoHints (as implemented) does not produce a viable authentication system, as the login success rate was 25% 7-11 days after passphrase selection. We analyze the root causes of login errors, finding that most were due to inexact recall of free-form text input. This finding points towards opportunities to improve the system design, and we suggest improvements that we believe will lead to viable systems that employ geographic hints.
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How this classification was reachedexpand
Full frame machine prediction
Teacher imitationNot calibrated prevalence, not ground truth. Human validation pending. The Gemma side is a direct model label for every work in the frame, read from the title-only record. The Codex side is a classifier learned from the 10,348 direct Codex labels and calibrated to design-weighted sample rates; fields without enough sample support carry no Codex call. Candidate is the union of the two sides; consensus is their intersection. These outputs are machine_predicted_unvalidated and are not human labels.
Distilled classifier scores by category (both heads)
| Category | Codex | Gemma |
|---|---|---|
| Metaresearch | 0.001 | 0.015 |
| Meta-epidemiology (narrow) | 0.001 | 0.000 |
| Meta-epidemiology (broad) | 0.000 | 0.000 |
| Bibliometrics | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Science and technology studies | 0.000 | 0.001 |
| Scholarly communication | 0.001 | 0.003 |
| Open science | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Research integrity | 0.001 | 0.001 |
| Insufficient payload (model declined to judge) | 0.004 | 0.001 |
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.
score_only:v0-immature-baseline · verbatim from the scoring run: score_only means the number may rank works, and no category label ships from itClassification
machine, unvalidatedMachine predicted; a candidate call from one source (direct Gemma or distilled Codex), not a consensus.
How this classification was reached, model by model and score by score, is at the end of the page under "How this classification was reached".