Cryptography Reference
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Phone are clustered together. For students also, Online
Phone, but Online
and USB form a cluster of their own. This finding can be termed intuitive since on-
line PM was expected to possess better usability than the two portable PMs. Moreover,
non-students generally found the three PMs tougher and less satisfactory compared to
Students. The reason for this is simple: students are much more technologically savvy
compared to non-students.
Post test analysis, on the other hand, reveals surprising facts. For all of our users,
the order of preference turned out to be USB
USB
Phone
Online, with USB and Phone
clustered together. For students, the order was USB
Phone, whereby USB
and Online form a cluster together. On the other hand, for non-students, the order of
preference is Phone
Online
Online, and USB and Phone form a cluster. In general,
we found that the portable managers are preferred over the online manager.
The above turn-around from the during test to post test can be credited to the fact that
the users were not comfortable giving Control of their passwords to an online entity and
preferred to manage their passwords themselves on their own portable devices. This
preference reversal from during test to post test results was also confirmed by users'
final preferences about the three PMs.
We also observe that the non-students had a much stronger liking for Phone compared
to students while looking at overall post test data, and in terms of giving control of their
passwords. Being less tech-savvy, non-students perhaps felt much more comfortable and
safe while copying in their passwords (from the phone to authentication terminal) manu-
ally as opposed to letting a device (USB or remote server) doing it for them automatically.
USB
6
Conclusions and Future Direction
We presented a comparative usability study of three notable traditional password man-
agers. Contrary to our intuition, overall the two portable managers were preferred over
the online manager, despite the better usability of the latter. Surprisingly, the online
manager was the last choice for non-technical people, who mostly preferred the phone
manager. Also, technical people were more inclined towards the USB manager in com-
parison to the online manager. These findings can generally be credited to the fact that
the users were not comfortable giving control of their passwords to an online entity and
preferred to manage their passwords themselves on their portable devices.
Based on our results, we can conclude that portable managers represent a more
promising password management approach than online managers. The latter provide
a higher degree of confidence to users in managing their passwords. However, current
portable managers (especially phone managers) do not offer the usability as expected
by average users, thus motivating the need for usable portable managers in the future.
Owing to an ever increasing “always on, always with me” mobile phone usage trend,
we believe that developing user-friendly and secure phone managers is an interesting
and important research direction.
References
1. Gabber, E., Gibbons, P.B., Matias, Y., Mayer, A.J.: How to make personalized web browsing
simple, secure, and anonymous. In: Proceedings of Financial Cryptography 1997, Anguilla,
West Indies, pp. 17-32 ( February 1997)
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