Eventually, as the number of epic hacks increased, we
started to lean on a curious psychological crutch: the
notion of the “strong” password. It’s the compromise that
growing web companies came up with to keep people
signing up and entrusting data to their sites. It’s the BandAid
that’s now being washed away in a river of blood.
One proposal to reduce problems related to text passwords
is to use password managers. These typically require that
users remember only a master password. They store (or regenerate)
and send on behalf of the user, to web sites
hosting user accounts, the appropriate passwords. Ideally
the latter are generated by the manager itself and are
stronger than user-chosen passwords. However,
implemen-tations of password managers introduce their
own usability issues [Chiasson et al. 2006] that can
exacerbate security problems, and their centralized
90 IJCSNS International Journal of Computer Science and Network Security, VOL.14 No.8, August 2014
architecture in-troduces a single point of failure and
attractive target: attacker access to the master password
provides control over all of the user’s managed accounts.
When text password users resort to unsafe coping
strategies, such as reusing pass-words across accounts to
help with memorability, the decrease in security cannot be
addressed by simply strengthening, in isolation, the
underlying technical secu-rity of a system. Usability issues
often significantly impact its real-world security. User
interface design decisions may unintentionally sway user
behaviour towards less secure behaviour. Successful
authentication solutions must thus also include improved
usability design based on appropriate research taking
into account the abilities and limitations of the target
users. In graphical passwords, human mem-ory for visual
information is leveraged in hope of a reduced memory
burden that will facilitate the selection and use of more
secure or less predictable passwords, dissuading users
from unsafe coping practices.