Geezers Pick Stronger Passwords Than Young'uns

Posted by timothy on Saturday June 2, 2012 @05:29AM from the as-many-characters-as-the-post-it-will-hold dept.

McGruber writes "Joseph Bonneau, a computer scientist at the University of Cambridge, calculated the password strengths of nearly 70 million Yahoo! users. He compared the strengths of passwords chosen by different demographic groups and compared the results. People over the age of 55 pick passwords double the strength of those chosen by people under 25 years old." Does this mean that the younger users are more cavalier and naive, or are they simply more cynical about the actual value of strong passwords in the era of large-scale user-database compromises?

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Re:How did he analyse it? by Joe+Loughry · 2012-06-02 06:16 · Score: 5, Informative

The methodology is explained in the paper "The science of guessing: analyzing an anonymized corpus of 70 million passwords" available at http://www.cl.cam.ac.uk/~jcb82/doc/B12-IEEESP-analyzing_70M_anonymized_passwords.pdf Plain text passwords were captured at login time in coöperation with Yahoo! under ethics and legal-approved rules. The experimental design contains technical measures to ensure that user IDs were not associated with passwords and further measures to protect against passwords that might be used in more than one place.