Carnegie Mellon University
February 26, 2021

Cranor featured in The Guardian

Lorrie Cranorthe FORE Systems Professor of Computer Science and of Engineering and Public Policy, and Director of CyLab Usable Privacy and Security Laboratory (CUPS), was recently featured in The Guardian in their piece, The tyranny of passwords — is it time for a rethink?

In the article, Cranor explains the deficiency people have when it comes to creating safe passwords. “The best password is a random password,” says Cranor, “but people aren’t good at generating random passwords or remembering them.” Almost everything you intuitively believe about passwords is not correct. “If you struggle to remember your passwords,” Cranor says, “write them in a notebook and hide it at home. It’s highly unlikely that a hacker is going to get access to your house.”

“We all think alike,” says Cranor, “and we all do similar things, in creating passwords. People think they are being smart by going diagonally on the keyboard,” Cranor says. “But it’s in all the hacker dictionaries.”

We would not leave the door to our house open and yet many of us leave our digital accounts vulnerable to cybercriminals every day, because of our laissez-faire attitude to password security. 

According to security experts, there is a solution to all this chaos and confusion: a password manager. A password manager will randomly generate passwords for all your various accounts, and store them for you. All users need to do is remember your master password, and the password manager does the rest.

To learn more about creating safe passwords, read the full article.