TEDxCMU
Lorrie Faith Cranor: What’s wrong with your pa$$w0rd?
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Lorrie Faith Cranor studied thousands of real passwords to figure out the surprising, very common mistakes that users -- and secured sites -- make to compromise security. And how, you may ask, did she study thousands of real passwords without compromising the security of any users? That's a story in itself. It's secret data worth knowing, especially if your password is 123456 ...
Lorrie Faith Cranor - Security researcher
At Carnegie Mellon University, Lorrie Faith Cranor studies online privacy, usable security, phishing, spam and other research around keeping us safe online. Full bio
At Carnegie Mellon University, Lorrie Faith Cranor studies online privacy, usable security, phishing, spam and other research around keeping us safe online. Full bio
Double-click the English transcript below to play the video.
00:12
I am a computer science and engineering
professor here at Carnegie Mellon,
professor here at Carnegie Mellon,
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and my research focuses on
usable privacy and security,
usable privacy and security,
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and so my friends like to give me examples
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of their frustrations with computing systems,
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especially frustrations related to
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unusable privacy and security.
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So passwords are something that I hear a lot about.
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A lot of people are frustrated with passwords,
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and it's bad enough
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when you have to have one really good password
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that you can remember
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but nobody else is going to be able to guess.
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But what do you do when you have accounts
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on a hundred different systems
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and you're supposed to have a unique password
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for each of these systems?
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It's tough.
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At Carnegie Mellon, they used to make it
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actually pretty easy for us
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to remember our passwords.
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The password requirement up through 2009
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was just that you had to have a password
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with at least one character.
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Pretty easy. But then they changed things,
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and at the end of 2009, they announced
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that we were going to have a new policy,
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and this new policy required
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passwords that were at least eight characters long,
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with an uppercase letter, lowercase letter,
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a digit, a symbol,
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you couldn't use the same
character more than three times,
character more than three times,
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and it wasn't allowed to be in a dictionary.
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Now, when they implemented this new policy,
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a lot of people, my colleagues and friends,
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came up to me and they said, "Wow,
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now that's really unusable.
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Why are they doing this to us,
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and why didn't you stop them?"
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And I said, "Well, you know what?
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They didn't ask me."
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But I got curious, and I decided to go talk
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to the people in charge of our computer systems
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and find out what led them to introduce
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this new policy,
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and they said that the university
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had joined a consortium of universities,
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and one of the requirements of membership
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was that we had to have stronger passwords
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that complied with some new requirements,
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and these requirements were that our passwords
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had to have a lot of entropy.
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Now entropy is a complicated term,
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but basically it measures the strength of passwords.
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But the thing is, there isn't actually
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a standard measure of entropy.
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Now, the National Institute
of Standards and Technology
of Standards and Technology
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has a set of guidelines
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which have some rules of thumb
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for measuring entropy,
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but they don't have anything too specific,
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and the reason they only have rules of thumb
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is it turns out they don't actually have any good data
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on passwords.
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In fact, their report states,
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"Unfortunately, we do not have much data
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on the passwords users
choose under particular rules.
choose under particular rules.
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NIST would like to obtain more data
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on the passwords users actually choose,
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but system administrators
are understandably reluctant
are understandably reluctant
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to reveal password data to others."
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So this is a problem, but our research group
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looked at it as an opportunity.
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We said, "Well, there's a need
for good password data.
for good password data.
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Maybe we can collect some good password data
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and actually advance the state of the art here.
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So the first thing we did is,
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we got a bag of candy bars
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and we walked around campus
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and talked to students, faculty and staff,
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and asked them for information
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about their passwords.
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Now we didn't say, "Give us your password."
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No, we just asked them about their password.
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How long is it? Does it have a digit?
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Does it have a symbol?
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And were you annoyed at having to create
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a new one last week?
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So we got results from 470 students,
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faculty and staff,
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and indeed we confirmed that the new policy
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was very annoying,
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but we also found that people said
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they felt more secure with these new passwords.
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We found that most people knew
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they were not supposed to
write their password down,
write their password down,
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and only 13 percent of them did,
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but disturbingly, 80 percent of people
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said they were reusing their password.
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Now, this is actually more dangerous
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than writing your password down,
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because it makes you much
more susceptible to attackers.
more susceptible to attackers.
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So if you have to, write your passwords down,
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but don't reuse them.
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We also found some interesting things
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about the symbols people use in passwords.
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So CMU allows 32 possible symbols,
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but as you can see, there's only a small number
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that most people are using,
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so we're not actually getting very much strength
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from the symbols in our passwords.
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So this was a really interesting study,
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and now we had data from 470 people,
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but in the scheme of things,
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that's really not very much password data,
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and so we looked around to see
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where could we find additional password data?
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So it turns out there are a lot of people
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going around stealing passwords,
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and they often go and post these passwords
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on the Internet.
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So we were able to get access
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to some of these stolen password sets.
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This is still not really ideal for research, though,
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because it's not entirely clear
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where all of these passwords came from,
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or exactly what policies were in effect
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when people created these passwords.
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So we wanted to find some better source of data.
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So we decided that one thing we could do
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is we could do a study and have people
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actually create passwords for our study.
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So we used a service called
Amazon Mechanical Turk,
Amazon Mechanical Turk,
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and this is a service where you can post
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a small job online that takes a minute,
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a few minutes, an hour,
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and pay people, a penny, ten cents, a few dollars,
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to do a task for you,
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and then you pay them through Amazon.com.
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So we paid people about 50 cents
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to create a password following our rules
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and answering a survey,
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and then we paid them again to come back
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two days later and log in
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using their password and answering another survey.
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So we did this, and we collected 5,000 passwords,
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and we gave people a bunch of different policies
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to create passwords with.
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So some people had a pretty easy policy,
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we call it Basic8,
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and here the only rule was that your password
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had to have at least eight characters.
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Then some people had a much harder policy,
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and this was very similar to the CMU policy,
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that it had to have eight characters
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including uppercase, lowercase, digit, symbol,
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and pass a dictionary check.
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And one of the other policies we tried,
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and there were a whole bunch more,
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but one of the ones we tried was called Basic16,
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and the only requirement here
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was that your password had
to have at least 16 characters.
to have at least 16 characters.
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All right, so now we had 5,000 passwords,
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and so we had much more detailed information.
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Again we see that there's only a small number
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of symbols that people are actually using
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in their passwords.
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We also wanted to get an idea of how strong
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the passwords were that people were creating,
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but as you may recall, there isn't a good measure
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of password strength.
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So what we decided to do was to see
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how long it would take to crack these passwords
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using the best cracking tools
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that the bad guys are using,
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or that we could find information about
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in the research literature.
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So to give you an idea of how bad guys
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go about cracking passwords,
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they will steal a password file
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that will have all of the passwords
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in kind of a scrambled form, called a hash,
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and so what they'll do is they'll make a guess
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as to what a password is,
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run it through a hashing function,
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and see whether it matches
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the passwords they have on
their stolen password list.
their stolen password list.
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So a dumb attacker will try every password in order.
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They'll start with AAAAA and move on to AAAAB,
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and this is going to take a really long time
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before they get any passwords
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that people are really likely to actually have.
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A smart attacker, on the other hand,
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does something much more clever.
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They look at the passwords
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that are known to be popular
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from these stolen password sets,
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and they guess those first.
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So they're going to start by guessing "password,"
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and then they'll guess "I love you," and "monkey,"
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and "12345678,"
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because these are the passwords
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that are most likely for people to have.
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In fact, some of you probably have these passwords.
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So what we found
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by running all of these 5,000 passwords we collected
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through these tests to see how strong they were,
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we found that the long passwords
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were actually pretty strong,
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and the complex passwords were pretty strong too.
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However, when we looked at the survey data,
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we saw that people were really frustrated
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by the very complex passwords,
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and the long passwords were a lot more usable,
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and in some cases, they were actually
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even stronger than the complex passwords.
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So this suggests that,
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instead of telling people that they need
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to put all these symbols and numbers
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and crazy things into their passwords,
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we might be better off just telling people
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to have long passwords.
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Now here's the problem, though:
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Some people had long passwords
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that actually weren't very strong.
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You can make long passwords
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that are still the sort of thing
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that an attacker could easily guess.
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So we need to do more than
just say long passwords.
just say long passwords.
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There has to be some additional requirements,
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and some of our ongoing research is looking at
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what additional requirements we should add
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to make for stronger passwords
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that also are going to be easy for people
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to remember and type.
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Another approach to getting people to have
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stronger passwords is to use a password meter.
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Here are some examples.
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You may have seen these on the Internet
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when you were creating passwords.
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We decided to do a study to find out
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whether these password meters actually work.
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Do they actually help people
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have stronger passwords,
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and if so, which ones are better?
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So we tested password meters that were
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different sizes, shapes, colors,
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different words next to them,
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and we even tested one that was a dancing bunny.
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As you type a better password,
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the bunny dances faster and faster.
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So this was pretty fun.
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What we found
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was that password meters do work.
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(Laughter)
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Most of the password meters were actually effective,
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and the dancing bunny was very effective too,
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but the password meters that were the most effective
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were the ones that made you work harder
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before they gave you that thumbs up and said
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you were doing a good job,
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and in fact we found that most
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of the password meters on the Internet today
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are too soft.
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They tell you you're doing a good job too early,
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and if they would just wait a little bit
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before giving you that positive feedback,
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you probably would have better passwords.
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Now another approach to better passwords, perhaps,
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is to use pass phrases instead of passwords.
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So this was an xkcd cartoon
from a couple of years ago,
from a couple of years ago,
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and the cartoonist suggests
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that we should all use pass phrases,
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and if you look at the second row of this cartoon,
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you can see the cartoonist is suggesting
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that the pass phrase "correct horse battery staple"
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would be a very strong pass phrase
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and something really easy to remember.
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He says, in fact, you've already remembered it.
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And so we decided to do a research study
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to find out whether this was true or not.
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In fact, everybody who I talk to,
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who I mention I'm doing password research,
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they point out this cartoon.
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"Oh, have you seen it? That xkcd.
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Correct horse battery staple."
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So we did the research study to see
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what would actually happen.
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So in our study, we used Mechanical Turk again,
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and we had the computer pick the random words
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in the pass phrase.
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Now the reason we did this
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is that humans are not very good
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at picking random words.
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If we asked a human to do it,
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they would pick things that were not very random.
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So we tried a few different conditions.
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In one condition, the computer picked
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11:28
from a dictionary of the very common words
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in the English language,
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11:31
and so you'd get pass phrases like
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"try there three come."
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11:35
And we looked at that, and we said,
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"Well, that doesn't really seem very memorable."
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11:40
So then we tried picking words
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that came from specific parts of speech,
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11:44
so how about noun-verb-adjective-noun.
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11:47
That comes up with something
that's sort of sentence-like.
that's sort of sentence-like.
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11:49
So you can get a pass phrase like
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11:51
"plan builds sure power"
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or "end determines red drug."
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11:55
And these seemed a little bit more memorable,
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11:58
and maybe people would like those a little bit better.
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12:01
We wanted to compare them with passwords,
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2572
12:03
and so we had the computer
pick random passwords,
pick random passwords,
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12:07
and these were nice and short, but as you can see,
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12:09
they don't really look very memorable.
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12:11
And then we decided to try something called
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12:13
a pronounceable password.
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12:14
So here the computer picks random syllables
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12:17
and puts them together
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so you have something sort of pronounceable,
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like "tufritvi" and "vadasabi."
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12:23
That one kind of rolls off your tongue.
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12:25
So these were random passwords that were
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12:27
generated by our computer.
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12:30
So what we found in this study was that, surprisingly,
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12:33
pass phrases were not actually all that good.
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12:37
People were not really better at remembering
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12:40
the pass phrases than these random passwords,
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12:43
and because the pass phrases are longer,
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12:45
they took longer to type
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12:47
and people made more errors while typing them in.
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12:50
So it's not really a clear win for pass phrases.
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12:53
Sorry, all of you xkcd fans.
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12:56
On the other hand, we did find
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12:58
that pronounceable passwords
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13:00
worked surprisingly well,
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13:01
and so we actually are doing some more research
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13:04
to see if we can make that
approach work even better.
approach work even better.
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13:07
So one of the problems
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13:09
with some of the studies that we've done
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13:10
is that because they're all done
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using Mechanical Turk,
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13:14
these are not people's real passwords.
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13:15
They're the passwords that they created
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13:18
or the computer created for them for our study.
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13:20
And we wanted to know whether people
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13:22
would actually behave the same way
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13:24
with their real passwords.
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13:26
So we talked to the information
security office at Carnegie Mellon
security office at Carnegie Mellon
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13:30
and asked them if we could
have everybody's real passwords.
have everybody's real passwords.
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13:34
Not surprisingly, they were a little bit reluctant
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13:35
to share them with us,
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13:37
but we were actually able to work out
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13:39
a system with them
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13:40
where they put all of the real passwords
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13:42
for 25,000 CMU students, faculty and staff,
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13:45
into a locked computer in a locked room,
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13:47
not connected to the Internet,
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13:49
and they ran code on it that we wrote
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13:51
to analyze these passwords.
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13:53
They audited our code.
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13:54
They ran the code.
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1312
13:55
And so we never actually saw
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13:57
anybody's password.
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14:00
We got some interesting results,
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14:02
and those of you Tepper students in the back
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14:03
will be very interested in this.
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2875
14:06
So we found that the passwords created
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3731
14:10
by people affiliated with the
school of computer science
school of computer science
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2158
14:12
were actually 1.8 times stronger
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2324
14:14
than those affiliated with the business school.
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14:18
We have lots of other really interesting
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14:20
demographic information as well.
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14:22
The other interesting thing that we found
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14:24
is that when we compared
the Carnegie Mellon passwords
the Carnegie Mellon passwords
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14:27
to the Mechanical Turk-generated passwords,
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2283
14:29
there was actually a lot of similarities,
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2619
14:31
and so this helped validate our research method
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14:33
and show that actually, collecting passwords
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14:36
using these Mechanical Turk studies
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14:38
is actually a valid way to study passwords.
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14:41
So that was good news.
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14:43
Okay, I want to close by talking about
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some insights I gained while on sabbatical
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14:47
last year in the Carnegie Mellon art school.
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14:51
One of the things that I did
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14:52
is I made a number of quilts,
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14:53
and I made this quilt here.
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14:55
It's called "Security Blanket."
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14:57
(Laughter)
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14:59
And this quilt has the 1,000
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15:02
most frequent passwords stolen
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2328
15:05
from the RockYou website.
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2571
15:07
And the size of the passwords is proportional
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2061
15:09
to how frequently they appeared
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15:11
in the stolen dataset.
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2248
15:13
And what I did is I created this word cloud,
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15:16
and I went through all 1,000 words,
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2132
15:18
and I categorized them into
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15:20
loose thematic categories.
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2380
15:22
And it was, in some cases,
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1903
15:24
it was kind of difficult to figure out
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2038
15:26
what category they should be in,
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15:28
and then I color-coded them.
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1899
15:30
So here are some examples of the difficulty.
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2619
15:33
So "justin."
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1181
15:34
Is that the name of the user,
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1829
15:36
their boyfriend, their son?
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1322
15:37
Maybe they're a Justin Bieber fan.
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2888
15:40
Or "princess."
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2225
15:42
Is that a nickname?
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1635
15:44
Are they Disney princess fans?
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1595
15:45
Or maybe that's the name of their cat.
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3694
15:49
"Iloveyou" appears many times
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1655
15:51
in many different languages.
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1545
15:52
There's a lot of love in these passwords.
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3735
15:56
If you look carefully, you'll see there's also
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1680
15:58
some profanity,
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2267
16:00
but it was really interesting to me to see
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948301
1950
16:02
that there's a lot more love than hate
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2307
16:04
in these passwords.
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2292
16:06
And there are animals,
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1490
16:08
a lot of animals,
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1360
16:09
and "monkey" is the most common animal
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2304
16:12
and the 14th most popular password overall.
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3675
16:15
And this was really curious to me,
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2231
16:17
and I wondered, "Why are monkeys so popular?"
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2523
16:20
And so in our last password study,
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3352
16:23
any time we detected somebody
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1686
16:25
creating a password with the word "monkey" in it,
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973471
2649
16:28
we asked them why they had
a monkey in their password.
a monkey in their password.
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3030
16:31
And what we found out --
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1910
16:33
we found 17 people so far, I think,
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2103
16:35
who have the word "monkey" --
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1283
16:36
We found out about a third of them said
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1812
16:38
they have a pet named "monkey"
436
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1740
16:39
or a friend whose nickname is "monkey,"
437
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2291
16:42
and about a third of them said
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1660
16:43
that they just like monkeys
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1533
16:45
and monkeys are really cute.
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1638
16:47
And that guy is really cute.
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3639
16:50
So it seems that at the end of the day,
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3408
16:54
when we make passwords,
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1783
16:55
we either make something that's really easy
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1974
16:57
to type, a common pattern,
445
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3009
17:00
or things that remind us of the word password
446
1008933
2486
17:03
or the account that we've created the password for,
447
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3312
17:06
or whatever.
448
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2617
17:09
Or we think about things that make us happy,
449
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2642
17:11
and we create our password
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1304
17:13
based on things that make us happy.
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2238
17:15
And while this makes typing
452
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2863
17:18
and remembering your password more fun,
453
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2870
17:21
it also makes it a lot easier
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1807
17:23
to guess your password.
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1506
17:24
So I know a lot of these TED Talks
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17:26
are inspirational
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1634
17:27
and they make you think about nice, happy things,
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17:30
but when you're creating your password,
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17:32
try to think about something else.
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17:34
Thank you.
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17:35
(Applause)
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553
ABOUT THE SPEAKER
Lorrie Faith Cranor - Security researcherAt Carnegie Mellon University, Lorrie Faith Cranor studies online privacy, usable security, phishing, spam and other research around keeping us safe online.
Why you should listen
Lorrie Faith Cranor is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, where she is director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) and co-director of the MSIT-Privacy Engineering masters program. She is also a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies, Inc. She has authored over 100 research papers on online privacy, usable security, phishing, spam, electronic voting, anonymous publishing, and other topics.
Cranor plays a key role in building the usable privacy and security research community, having co-edited the seminal book Security and Usability and founded the Symposium On Usable Privacy and Security (SOUPS). She also chaired the Platform for Privacy Preferences Project (P3P) Specification Working Group at the W3C and authored the book Web Privacy with P3P. She has served on a number of boards, including the Electronic Frontier Foundation Board of Directors, and on the editorial boards of several journals. In 2003 she was named one of the top 100 innovators 35 or younger by Technology Review.
Lorrie Faith Cranor | Speaker | TED.com