Leveraging Semantic Transformation to Investigate Password Habits and Their Causes

It is no secret that users have difficulty choosing and remembering strong passwords, especially when asked to choose different passwords across different accounts. While research has shed light on password weaknesses and reuse, less is known about user motivations for following bad password practices. Understanding these motivations can help us design better interventions that work with the habits of users and not against them. We present a comprehensive user study in which we both collect and analyze users' real passwords and the reasoning behind their password habits. This enables us to contrast the users' actual behaviors with their intentions. We find that user intent often mismatches practice, and that this, coupled with some misconceptions and convenience, fosters bad password habits. Our work is the first to show the discrepancy between user intent and practice when creating passwords, and to investigate how users trade off security for memorability.