Skip to main page content
U.S. flag

An official website of the United States government

Dot gov

The .gov means it’s official.
Federal government websites often end in .gov or .mil. Before sharing sensitive information, make sure you’re on a federal government site.

Https

The site is secure.
The https:// ensures that you are connecting to the official website and that any information you provide is encrypted and transmitted securely.

Access keys NCBI Homepage MyNCBI Homepage Main Content Main Navigation
. 2019;5(1):https://doi.org/10.1093/cybsec/tyz015.

"Passwords protect my stuff"-a study of children's password practices

Yee-Yin Choong  1 , Mary F Theofanos  1 , Karen Renaud  2 , Suzanne Prior  2
Affiliations

"Passwords protect my stuff"-a study of children's password practices

Yee-Yin Choong et al. J Cybersecur. 2019.

Abstract

Children use technology from a very young age and often have to authenticate. The goal of this study is to explore children's practices, perceptions, and knowledge regarding passwords. Given the limited work to date and that the world's cyber posture and culture will be dependent on today's youth, it is imperative to conduct cyber-security research with children. We conducted surveys of 189 3rd to 8th graders from two Midwest schools in the USA. We found that children have on average two passwords for school and three to four passwords for home. They kept their passwords private and did not share with others. They created passwords with an average length of 7 (3rd to 5th graders) and 10 (6-8th graders). But, only about 13% of the children created very strong passwords. Generating strong passwords requires mature cognitive and linguistic capabilities which children at this developmental stage have not yet mastered. They believed that passwords provide access control, protect their privacy and keep their "stuff" safe. Overall, children had appropriate mental models of passwords and demonstrated good password practices. Cyber-security education should strive to reinforce these positive practices while continuing to provide and promote age-appropriate developmental security skills. Given the study's sample size and limited generalizability, we are expanding our research to include children from 3rd to 12th graders across multiple US school districts.

Keywords: authentication; children; password practices; passwords; perceptions.

PubMed Disclaimer

Conflict of interest statement

Conflict of interest statement. Any mention of commercial products or reference to commercial organizations is for information only; it does not imply recommendation or endorsement by the National Institute of Standards and Technology nor does it imply that the products mentioned are necessarily the best available for the purpose.

Figures

Figure 1:
Figure 1:
Screen time allowed (3rd to 5th).
Figure 2:
Figure 2:
Screen time spent (6–8th).
Figure 3:
Figure 3:
How children retain passwords.
Figure 4:
Figure 4:
Character types in passwords.
Figure 5:
Figure 5:
Character types by positions in passwords (3rd to 5th). (L—lowercase, U—uppercase, N—numbers)
Figure 6:
Figure 6:
Character types by positions in passwords (6–8th). (L—lowercase, U—uppercase, N—numbers)
Figure 7:
Figure 7:
Password strength.
Figure 8:
Figure 8:
Why passwords? (3rd to 5th).
Figure 9:
Figure 9:
Why passwords? (6–8th).
Figure 10:
Figure 10:
Why passwords? (6–8th)—only looking at the first reason given.
Figure 11:
Figure 11:
Character types by positions in passwords (by adults). (L—lowercase, U—uppercase, N—numbers). Adapted from [15]
See this image and copyright information in PMC

References

    1. MacFarlane S, Read J, Höysniemi J. et al. Half-day tutorial: evaluating interactive products for and with children. Interact 2003;1027–1028.
    1. Hanna L, Risden K, Alexander K. Guidelines for usability testing with children. Interactions 1997;4:9–14.
    1. Renaud K, Maguire J. Regulating access to adult content (with privacy preservation). In: Proceedings of the 33rd Annual ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems, pp. 4019–4028. Seoul, Republic of Korea: ACM, 2015.
    1. Loban W. The Language of Elementary School Children. Champaign, IL: National Council of Teachers of English, 1963.
    1. Kress G. Before Writing: Rethinking the Pathway into Writing. London, UK: Routledge, 1997.