PSV (Password Security Visualizer): From Password Checking to User Education

摘要

This paper presents the Password Security Visualizer (PSV), an interactive visualization system speci cally designed for password se- curity education. PSV can be seen as a recon gurable ox" containing di erent proactive password checkers (PPCs) and visualizers of password security information, allowing it to be used like a many in one" or hy- brid" PPC. PSV can provide many new features that do not exist in traditional PPCs, thus having a greater potential to achieve its goals of educating users. Using purely client-side Web-based technologies, we implemented a prototype of PSV as an open-source software tool on a 2-D animated canvas. To evaluate the actual performance of our imple- mented PSV prototype against traditional PPCs, we conducted a semi- structured interview involving 20 human participants. Our qualitative analysis of the results showed that PSV was considered the most in- formative and recommended by most participants as a good educational tool. To the best of our knowledge, PSV is the rst system combining dif- ferent PPCs together for user education, and the user study is the rst of this kind on comparing educational e ectiveness of di erent PPCs (and PPC-like password security tools such as PSV).