skip to main content
US FlagAn official website of the United States government
dot gov icon
Official websites use .gov
A .gov website belongs to an official government organization in the United States.
https lock icon
Secure .gov websites use HTTPS
A lock ( lock ) or https:// means you've safely connected to the .gov website. Share sensitive information only on official, secure websites.


Search for: All records

Creators/Authors contains: "Mendoza, Michael"

Note: When clicking on a Digital Object Identifier (DOI) number, you will be taken to an external site maintained by the publisher. Some full text articles may not yet be available without a charge during the embargo (administrative interval).
What is a DOI Number?

Some links on this page may take you to non-federal websites. Their policies may differ from this site.

  1. Users struggle to select strong passwords. System-assigned passwords address this problem, but they can be difficult for users to memorize. While password managers can help store system-assigned passwords, there will always be passwords that a user needs to memorize, such as their password manager’s master password. As such, there is a critical need for research into helping users memorize system-assigned passwords. In this work, we compare three different designs for password memorization aids inspired by the method of loci or memory palace. Design One displays a two-dimensional scene with objects placed inside it in arbitrary (and randomized) positions, with Design Two fixing the objects’ position within the scene, and Design Three displays the scene using a navigable, three-dimensional representation. In an A-B study of these designs, we find that, surprisingly, there is no statistically significant difference between the memorability of these three designs, nor that of assigning users a passphrase to memorize, which we used as the control in this study. However, we find that when perfect recall failed, our designs helped users remember a greater portion of the encoded system-assigned password than did a passphrase, a property we refer to as durability. Our results indicate that there could be room for memorization aids that incorporate fuzzy or error-correcting authentication. Similarly, our results suggest that simple (i.e., cheap to develop) designs of this nature may be just as effective as more complicated, high-fidelity (i.e., expensive to develop) designs. 
    more » « less