Economics of Website Users' Passwords

Two great papers on web site password security were published this month. We are swamped with passwords and every daily activity is increasingly linked with an online version, which requires users to register to obtain some additional benefits. Every organisation, resource, activity and event encourages us to visit their own website and sign-up.

Firstly, in Where Do [Password] Security Policies Come From?, Dinei Florêncio and Cormac Herley of Microsoft Research discuss the password policies of 75 different web sites, in an effort to determine password strength requirements with other aspects such as size of site, assets protected, number of users and frequency of attacks.

The authors' findings suggest that none of these are the key factors, and in fact some of the largest sites, most attacked and with higher-value assets have the weakest password policies. The authors suggest stronger policies exist where organisations are more insulated from the consequences of poor usability, whereas online retailers and sites that rely on advertising revenues have to compete rigorously for users and traffic. The paper also discusses how strong passwords need to be, and how this is affected also by what attack methods you are considering (e.g. online vs. offline brute-force), and whether other security controls are implemented (e.g. account lock-out).

This idea of considering the whole password environment is taken further in The Password Thicket: Technical and Market Failures in Human Authentication on the Web by Joseph Bonneau and Sören Preibusch at the Cambridge University Computing Laboratory, and presented at this year's Economics of Information Security (WEIS 2010). Their study included 150 web sites looking at password implementations. the study looked more broadly at the protective measures used— not just complexity requirements—but whether these were applied consistently across the site's functionality (e.g. registration/enrolment, log-in/authentication, password change, password reset/recovery, log-out), encryption during transmission, storage of passwords in clear text, inclusion of passwords in emails, as well as protection from brute-force attacks.

The authors found that stricter security in one area was often undermined by weaknesses in another, suggesting that a lack of standards is harming security. The paper also discusses economic interpretations, such as how deploying passwords might be being used to justify collection of marketing data, and how password insecurity can be a negative externality.