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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.
I spent 15 years developing a log in and security system used by about 80,000 web sites, and have had the opportunity to analyze millions of log in attempts. Based on that experience, heres what I do. People copy-paste user names and passwords and when they do, they get extraneous spaces at the beginning and end. So we trim spaces from the beginning and end (not the middle).
Some people use caps lock when they set their password, but most don't, so we show a big warning message if caps lock is on. Later, gdm (the Linux log in) started doing the same.