Password Education Based on Guidelines Tailored to Different Password Categories

General password policies do not guarantee that passwords fulfilling the requirement are good enough. The policies have a tendency to be too broad to be useful for all users. Different users have different designing processes based on what kind of passwords they most easily remember. Users are also often left to generate passwords on their own without any training. In this paper the authors used new password creation guidelines when teaching students password security. They divided passwords into three password categories: Word password, Mixture password and Non-word password. For each category different password generation guidelines were taught to students. Students had access to the password quality measurement tool, which not only measured the strength of the password but also guided students in the generation process.