GuidedPass: Helping Users to Create Strong and Memorable Passwords

Abstract

Password meters and policies are currently the only tools helping users to create stronger passwords. However, such tools often do not provide consistent or useful feedback to users, and their suggestions may decrease memorability of resulting passwords. Passwords that are difficult to remember promote bad practices, such as writing them down or password reuse, thus stronger passwords do not necessarily improve authentication security. In this work, we propose GuidedPass – a system that suggests real-time password modifications to users, which preserve the password’s semantic structure, while increasing password strength. Our suggestions are based on structural and semantic patterns mined from successfully recalled and strong passwords in several IRB-approved user studies [30]. We compare our approach to password creation with creation under NIST [12] policy, Ur et al. [26] guidance, and zxcvbn password-meter. We show that GuidedPass outperforms competing approaches both in password strength and in recall performance.