Jerquan Brabble
CYSE 201S
10/29/2022
The article that I reviewed was from the “Journal of Cybersecurity” titled “Passwords protect my stuff—a study of children’s password practices”
A basic overview of this journal is that a group did a study with different age groups on password strength and security between those groups. The main goal of this study was to determine if the children are creating appropriate passwords for the grades they are in with the skills that they have developed.
- In an industry where the number of breaches that happen increases by the day, we need to be practicing safe and secure password practices. That being the case, it’s important to make sure that the youth are also using appropriate password practices for their age. There’s nothing wrong with a 4th grader having a secure password that even some security professionals couldn’t crack but there is a problem if an 8th grader has a predictable password like “superman”.
- This study exists to show a relation between maturity in passwords and maturity in person. ie, as the age increases/decreases does the password complexity increase/decrease with it.
- There were numerous surveys done on students in grades 3 – 12. They were divided mainly into two different brackets. One was with students in grades 3-5 and the other was with students in grades 6-12. In other words when children first start getting introduced to computers and passwords vs teenagers that have more experience with computers. They tried to keep the responses to these surveys as open ended as possible by using tactics such as open ended responses to the questions.
- In these surveys they were able to gather information on student’s “perception” on passwords. In other words they took various details such as computer usage, password practices, and knowledge of passwords between the different age groups and tried to see if there was a correlation. Unsurprisingly, it seemed that the younger students had less passwords that they needed to use at home, most likely due to the fact that they would be less exposed to sites that would require passwords/account creations. Also, unsurprisingly it was found out that students in that older range experienced a 20 – 30% increase in various levels of authentication.
- This concept is related to our discussion in class because we just did a journal on the social media disorder scale to tell how active a person is on social media. In this study one of the key data points was how older students have these social media issues.
- In the surveys it looked at students with a variety of different ethnicities and ages. Which provided variety in the results.
- Through this study we have learned that the lower a student’s age is the more likely they are to have less passwords and have less complex passwords.
Choong, Y.-Y. (n.d.). Passwords protect my stuff. Academic.oup.com. Retrieved October 29, 2022, from https://academic.oup.com/cybersecurity/article/5/1/tyz015/5675082?searchresult=1#190057799