Text Entry Method Affects Password Security

TL;DR

This study investigates how different mobile text entry methods influence password creation and security, revealing significant effects on password complexity and vulnerability to cracking attacks.

Contribution

It provides empirical evidence that text entry methods significantly impact password structure and security, highlighting the need to consider input methods in password security design.

Findings

Different text entry methods lead to significantly different password structures.

Passwords generated with certain input methods are more vulnerable to cracking.

Text entry influences character type choices in passwords.

Abstract

Text-based passwords continue to be the prime form of authentication to computer systems. Today, they are increasingly created and used with mobile text entry methods, such as touchscreens and mobile keyboards, in addition to traditional physical keyboards. This raises a foundational question for usable security: whether text entry methods affect password generation and password security. This paper presents results from a between-group study with 63 participants, in which each group generated passwords for multiple virtual accounts using a different text entry method. Participants were also asked to recall their passwords afterwards. We applied analysis of structures and probabilities, with standard and recent security metrics and also performed cracking attacks on the collected data. The results show a significant effect of text entry methods on passwords. In particular, one of the experimental groups created passwords with significantly more lowercase letters per password than the control group ($t(60) = 2.99, p = 0.004$). The choices for character types in each group were also significantly different ($p=0.048, FET$). Our cracking attacks consequently expose significantly different resistance across groups ($p=0.031, FET$) and text entry method vulnerabilities. Our findings contribute to the understanding of password security in the context of usable interfaces.