Spaced Repetition and Mnemonics Enable Recall of Multiple Strong Passwords

—We report on a user study that provides evidence that spaced repetition and a specific mnemonic technique enable users to successfully recall multiple strong passwords over time. Remote research participants were asked to memorize 4 PersonAction-Object (PAO) stories where they chose a famous person from a drop-down list and were given machine-generated random action-object pairs. Users were also shown a photo of a scene and asked to imagine the PAO story taking place in the scene (e.g., Bill Gates—swallowing—bike on a beach). Subsequently, they were asked to recall the action-object pairs when prompted with the associated scene-person pairs following a spaced repetition schedule over a period of 127+ days. While we evaluated several spaced repetition schedules, the best results were obtained when

• Type: Journal
• Year: 2015
• Where: NDSS
• Authors: Jeremiah Blocki, Saranga Komanduri, Lorrie Faith Cranor, Anupam Datta
• Keywords: Computer Networks, NDSS 2015