Passwords and the evolution of imperfect authentication Page 1 78 COMMUNICATIONS OF
THE ACM | JULY 2015 | VOL. 58 | NO. 7 contributed articles DOI:10.1145/2699390 Theory on …

Despite countless attempts and near-universal desire to replace them, passwords are more
widely used and firmly entrenched than ever. The authors' exploration leads them to argue …

Textual passwords are perhaps the most prevalent mechanism for access control over the
Internet. Despite the fact that human-beings generally select passwords in a highly skewed …

The research literature on passwords is rich but little of it directly aids those charged with
securing web-facing services or setting policies. With a view to improving this situation we …

We provide the first treatment of typo-tolerant password authentication for arbitrary user-
selected passwords. Such a system, rather than simply rejecting a login attempt with an …

While a lot has changed in Internet security in the last 10 years, a lot has stayed the same–
such as the use of alphanumeric passwords. Passwords remain the dominant means of …

Password-composition policies are the result of service providers becoming increasingly
concerned about the security of online accounts. These policies restrict the space of user …

Multiple mechanisms exist to encourage users to create stronger passwords, including
minimum-length and character-class requirements, prohibiting blocklisted passwords, and …

i safety should be tunable on a per-site basis, depending on the degree of security desired.
For example t should be possible to specify a minimum length password, a restriction that …

In an effort to assess the strength of passwords, password strength checkers count lower-
case and upper-case letters, digits and other characters. However, this does not truly …