Passwords - Introduction

Unfortunately there is a big dilemma dealing with passwords as described by Kaufman, Perlman and Speciner:

„Humans are incapable of securely storing high-quality cryptographic keys and they have unacceptable speed and accuracy when performing such operations.”

In the following sections all aspects of choosing, retrieving or even compromising passwords will be discussed and summed up in ideas how to manage passwords better in all-day's life.

A simple way to test passwords on their own security is issued by the DSB Zürich:

https://passwortcheck.datenschutz.ch/check.php?lang=de

Due to the human-machine gap and severe design failures nowadays people have to deal with many security problems, which often arise in a simple context – the management of passwords. For example if you use the same password on your freemail account and for another provided service, the second service provider can easily access your mailbox, because he also knows your mail adress.

In addition to that identification methods with phone numbers or maiden names are at least as unsecure and of course this lack of real security environments lead to the problems of information stealing and user abuse. (e.g. payback cards) Passwords are one of the biggest practical problems, they are the (often shaky) foundation on which much of information security is built.

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