Lorrie Faith Cranor is an Associate Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy at Carnegie Mellon University, where she is director of the CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS) and co-director of the MSIT-Privacy Engineering masters program. She is also a co-founder of Wombat Security Technologies, Inc. She has authored over 100 research papers on online privacy, usable security, phishing, spam, electronic voting, anonymous publishing, and other topics…
Lorrie Faith Cranor – Security Researcher
I am a computer science and engineering professor here at Carnegie Mellon, and my research focuses on usable privacy and security, and so my friends like to give me examples of their frustrations with computing systems, especially frustrations related to unusable privacy and security.
So passwords are something that I hear a lot about. A lot of people are frustrated with passwords, and it’s bad enough when you have to have one really good password that you can remember but nobody else is going to be able to guess. But what do you do when you have accounts on a hundred different systems and you’re supposed to have a unique password for each of these systems? It’s tough.
At Carnegie Mellon, they used to make it actually pretty easy for us to remember our passwords. The password requirement up through 2009 was just that you had to have a password with at least one character. Pretty easy. But then they changed things, and at the end of 2009, they announced that we were going to have a new policy, and this new policy required passwords that were at least eight characters long, with an uppercase letter, lowercase letter, a digit, a symbol, you couldn’t use the same character more than three times, and it wasn’t allowed to be in a dictionary.
Now, when they implemented this new policy, a lot of people, my colleagues and friends, came up to me and they said, “Wow, now that’s really unusable. Why are they doing this to us, and why didn’t you stop them?”
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