The key takeaway here is that the people writing these guidelines try to give as much information as possible,” Reaves says. “That’s great, in theory. But the writers don’t prioritize the advice that’s most important. Or, more specifically, they don’t deprioritize the points that are significantly less important. And because there is so much security advice to include, the guidelines can be overwhelming – and the most important points get lost in the shuffle.
In other words, the guideline writers are compiling security information, rather than curating security information for their readers.
Drawing on what they learned from the interviews, the researchers developed two recommendations for improving future security guidelines.
First, guideline writers need a clear set of best practices on how to curate information so that security guidelines tell users both what they need to know and how to prioritize that information.
Second, writers – and the computer security community as a whole – need key messages that will make sense to audiences with varying levels of technical competence.
“Look, computer security is complicated,” Reaves says. “But medicine is even more complicated. Yet during the pandemic, public health experts were able to give the public fairly simple, concise guidelines on how to reduce our risk of contracting COVID. We need to be able to do the same thing for computer security.”
One problem is that a great deal of correct security advice contradicts “common knowledge” security practices. Password character classes – “must include capitals, lowercase, numbers, and symbols” – are a standard example. That idea got rooted in security requirements for banks and such, and it was a bad idea even then.
But getting rid of that idiocy looks, to the casual observer, like “weakening password requirements”.
Another problem is that the biggest security vulnerability that many businesses have is obedience to authority. If you can “social-engineer” someone into thinking you’re the big boss, then of course they’ll turn off all the security for you. And the scarier the big boss is, the more eager the underlings are to please them by doing exactly what the email from
bigboss@yourcopmany.comsays.Resistance to phishing is questioning claims of authority; it requires being willing to tell the big boss that no you won’t take the security down in response to an email, even a really convincing one. Which means that the worker has to be safe in doing so.
I don’t know a lot about computer security - but must include capitals, lowercase, numbers, etc seems like a good idea, why is it not?
TLDR: number of possible passwords is x^y where x is the size of your alphabet and y is the password length. Increasing y is better than increasing x.
It’s not immediately obvious, but it is pretty straightforward math. It has to do with password length vs alphabet size.
Let’s look at an 8 letter lowercase only password. Each time you increase the minimum length, you increase the maximum number of passwords by 26 (the number of letters in the alphabet). So it would be 26x26x26x26x26x26x26x26 or 26^8 which is 208,827,064,576. This is a lot of passwords, but pretty easy for a computer to brute force.
Let’s add the ! symbol. This means there are 27 options or 27^8. The total number of passwords is now 282,429,536,481. A bigger number, but not by much.
If we only have lowercase letters but increase it to 9 letters long, then it increases to 26^9 which equals 5,429,503,678,976. We’ve jumped from millions of passwords to billions with passwords only 1 character more.
If you allow all symbols and numbers, but also increase minimum length, you get the best of both without creating difficult to remember passwords.
This of course ignores the primary way people get past passwords: by asking the user for their password. It also ignores that an intruder is going to check the most common passwords and not just try them all. Adding numbers and symbols doesn’t really change the most common passwords though, since dragon just turns into Dragon1!
Also, not having alphabet requirements lets you use passphrases, which gives you access to little mental shortcuts like “lyrics of a song started in the middle of a line”.
Nobody is going to guess that your password is “fame, he’s ignored, action is” even if they know you like Spider-Man. And with 29 characters that password is not easily brute-forced, either. (Okay, this one has special characters but it works just as well without them.)
And it’s super easy to memorize even multiple passwords. You just need to remember song + offset, done.