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Password Autocorrect Without Compromising Security (threatpost.com)

msm1267 quotes a report from Threatpost: Intuitively, auto-correcting passwords would seem to be a terrible idea, and the worst security-for-convenience tradeoff in technology history. But a team of academics from Cornell University, MIT and a Dropbox security engineer say that the degradation of security from the introduction of such an authentication mechanism is negligible. The team -- Rahul Chatterjee, Ari Juels and Thomas Ristenpart of Cornell University, Anish Athalye of MIT, and Devdatta Akhawe of Dropbox -- presented their findings in a paper called "pASSWORD tYPOS and How to Correct Them Securely" at the recent IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. The paper describes a framework for what the team calls typo-tolerant passwords that significantly enhances usability without compromising security. The paper focuses on three common types of password errors that users make while typing: engaging caps lock; inadvertently capitalizing the first letter of a password; or adding or omitting characters to the beginning or end of a password. By instituting an autocorrect scheme, the researchers said in their paper that they could reduce common mistakes and user frustrations with logins. Recently, an anonymous user asked Slashdot how one creates a highly secure password after a study from Carnegie Mellon issued a warning about common user misconceptions. You can engage in the conversation and/or read the witty responses here.

2 of 140 comments (clear)

  1. Re:f!rstPo$t by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 1, Funny

    I'm a C# coder

    That explains a lot.

  2. Re:f!rstPo$t by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Funny

    to a human filename is the same as Filename and FILENAME

    But to the same human, jack and Jack is not the same.

    "I helped my uncle jack off a horse"
    "I helped my uncle Jack off a horse"