Impact of security education on password change

Abstract

Users and their passwords are the weakest link of security, because they tend to create passwords that are not strong, easy to remember and contain words that are familiar to them. Users' lack of security consciousness and their behavior can be influenced by security education. Our research explores the effect of password security training on the strength of the passwords chosen by the users. The objective of this paper is to explore possible differences in the quality of passwords between students from different faculties with different foreknowledge and education about passwords and security. In this paper we analyze the passwords of the students from the Faculty of Tourism and compare the results to the ones from the Faculty of electrical engineering and computer science at the University of Maribor. We collected the data by means of an online questionnaire, performed among undergraduate and graduate students. Despite our efforts to educate the users about the importance of frequent password change, a large percent of users did not change their passwords following the lectures. The overall conclusion of this preliminary study is that users still lack security knowledge regarding password change and need to be further educated in this direction.