Paper Info
Title
What Do Students Do With Their Assigned Default Passwords?
Abstract
Despite being the most widely used method of authentication, passwords still pose a significant threat to an information system's security. This threat is mostly attributed to the human factor, as users tend to select passwords that are easy to remember, but are not resilient to brute force or dictionary attacks. Worse yet, when not prompted to change their passwords on a regular basis the users tend to keep their original passwords, or even default passwords set by the system. These bad practices have been addressed over the decades, with the intention to educate the users on the security risks associated with them. A case study on passwords, used by the students at a Slovenian university to access the online grading system was conducted to examine whether passwords have improved over the course of the years. The results have shown that the vast majority of students continue to use the generated default passwords. Of the rest of the students who have changed their passwords, a large percent use short, simple passwords, consisting mainly of alphabetic or numeric characters. With no specific password policies enforced, user-created passwords remain weak, showing that users are still the Achilles' heel of information security.
Year
Venue
Field
2016
2016 39TH INTERNATIONAL CONVENTION ON INFORMATION AND COMMUNICATION TECHNOLOGY, ELECTRONICS AND MICROELECTRONICS (MIPRO)
Dictionary attack,Information system,Internet privacy,Authentication,Grading (education),Computer security,Computer science,Password psychology,Information security,Password policy,Password
DocType
Citations 
PageRank 
Conference
0
0.34
References 
Authors
11
2
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Lana Bosnjak100.68
Bostjan Brumen226025.48