Strong passwords: Practical issues

Nowadays, there are a lot of news about hacking attacks over the Internet against companies and government organization Web sites in the world. Victims are big companies such as Evernote, Facebook, Google and others. Web server providers understand that the current authentication systems and passwords should be strong. The end users who are not specialists in the security should understand how to select strong passwords. Now, however, there is no ideal way to set a strong password. Most of the users don't know important elements for password protection. In this paper, we analyze the tendencies in the password protection. We survey 262 students of the University of Aizu. A questionnaire consists of 15 questions about length of a password, strategy to create a new password and etc. We discuss useful techniques to create strong passwords and compare them. Our analysis is based on our data and the state of the art literature review. Our results can be helpful for the users to create a new password and/or change it and make it strong.