Adryana Hutchinson (The George Washington University), Jinwei Tang (Clark University), Adam Aviv (The George Washington University), Peter Story (Clark University)

To protect their security, users are instructed to use unique passwords for all their accounts. Password managers make this possible, as they can generate, store, and autofill passwords within a user’s browser. Unfortunately, prior work has identified usability issues which may deter users from using password managers. In this paper, we measure the prevalence of usability issues affecting four popular password managers (Chrome, Safari, Bitwarden, and Keeper). We tested these password managers with their out-of-the-box settings on 60 randomly sampled websites. We show that users are likely to encounter issues using password managers during account registration and authentication. We found that usability issues were widespread, but varied by password manager. Common issues included password managers not prompting the user to generate passwords, autofilling web forms incorrectly or not at all, and generating passwords that were incompatible with websites’ password policies. We found that Chrome and Safari had fewer interaction issues than the other password managers we tested. We conclude by suggesting ways that websites and password managers can improve their compatibility with each other. For example, we recommend that password managers tailor their passwords to websites’ requirements (like Chrome and Safari), or adopt alphanumeric-only password generation by default (like Bitwarden).

View More Papers

Securing the Satellite Software Stack

Samuel Jero (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Juliana Furgala (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Max A Heller (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Benjamin Nahill (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Samuel Mergendahl (MIT Lincoln Laboratory), Richard Skowyra (MIT Lincoln Laboratory)

Read More

Welcome to USEC

Mary Theofanos and Yasemin Acar

Read More

Understanding the Internet-Wide Vulnerability Landscape for ROS-based Robotic Vehicles...

Wentao Chen, Sam Der, Yunpeng Luo, Fayzah Alshammari, Qi Alfred Chen (University of California, Irvine)

Read More

Towards Integrating Human-Centered Cybersecurity Research Into Practice: A Practitioner...

Julie Haney, Clyburn Cunningham, Susanne Furman (National Institute of Standards and Technology)

Read More