Development of a Scale to Assess the Linguistic and Phonological Difficulty of Passwords

Published

June 22, 2014

Author(s)

Jennifer R. Bergstrom, Stefan A. Frisch, David C. Hawkins, Joy Hackenbracht, Kristen K. Greene, Mary Theofanos, Brian Griepentrog

Abstract

Increasingly, institutions are requiring or recommending that their employees use secure, system-generated passwords. It is not clear how well linguistic and phonological language properties map onto complex, randomly-generated passwords. Passwords containing a mix of letters, numbers, and other symbol characters may or may not be similar to common patterns in spoken or written English. The Linguistic Phonological Difficulty (LPD) scoring rubric was created by considering the extent to which a string of characters in a password resembles ordinary spoken or written language patterns. LPD is a score calculated through a six-rule process that considers these spoken and written patterns of English as well as memory load. These rules can be applied to any password. Our research explores mapping linguistic and phonological language properties onto complex randomly generated passwords to assess behavioral performance.

Proceedings Title

Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

Conference Dates

June 22-27, 2014

Conference Location

Crete, GR

Conference Title

The 16th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction

Pub Type

Conferences

Keywords

passwords, memorability, linguistics, phonology

Citation

Bergstrom, J. , Frisch, S. , Hawkins, D. , Hackenbracht, J. , Greene, K. , Theofanos, M. and Griepentrog, B. (2014), Development of a Scale to Assess the Linguistic and Phonological Difficulty of Passwords, Proceedings of the 16th International Conference on Human-Computer Interaction, Crete, GR (Accessed October 16, 2025)