Deep Dive on Relationship between Personality and Password Creation

Document Type

Conference Proceeding

Publication Date

7-16-2024

Publication Title

Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy

Pages

393-411

Publisher Name

Springer

Abstract

Passwords are a vital part of online security. One’s most sensitive and valuable information is often stored behind a password. With the rise in data breaches and other hacking related events, the need for proper password education is essential. This study looks at the connection between personality and strength of password created by 316 participants. In our questionnaire we asked the participants take a personality test that assigned them a color from the True Colors personality assessment. This color was used to tailor the password training videos the participants would later view. Participants were asked to create passwords that were then measured in two aspects: self-reported score and ZXCVBN calculated score. The ZXCVBN score compares generated passwords with commonly used words and phrases to see how strong they are against brute force password attempts. Our results showed that there was a higher percentage of improvement in the password scores of those who viewed the matching messaging based on their personality score than those who received a mismatching message. It was also shown that between the two parts of the questionnaire, participants did learn better password habits as there were fewer individuals reporting that they reused passwords and more who scored higher in other areas of password security.

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Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License
This work is licensed under a Creative Commons Attribution-Noncommercial-No Derivative Works 3.0 License.

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