The key takeaway here is that the people writing these guidelines try to give as much information as possible,” Reaves says. “That’s great, in theory. But the writers don’t prioritize the advice that’s most important. Or, more specifically, they don’t deprioritize the points that are significantly less important. And because there is so much security advice to include, the guidelines can be overwhelming – and the most important points get lost in the shuffle.

In other words, the guideline writers are compiling security information, rather than curating security information for their readers.

Drawing on what they learned from the interviews, the researchers developed two recommendations for improving future security guidelines.

First, guideline writers need a clear set of best practices on how to curate information so that security guidelines tell users both what they need to know and how to prioritize that information.

Second, writers – and the computer security community as a whole – need key messages that will make sense to audiences with varying levels of technical competence.

“Look, computer security is complicated,” Reaves says. “But medicine is even more complicated. Yet during the pandemic, public health experts were able to give the public fairly simple, concise guidelines on how to reduce our risk of contracting COVID. We need to be able to do the same thing for computer security.”

  • Jesus_666@feddit.de
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    1 year ago

    Also, not having alphabet requirements lets you use passphrases, which gives you access to little mental shortcuts like “lyrics of a song started in the middle of a line”.

    Nobody is going to guess that your password is “fame, he’s ignored, action is” even if they know you like Spider-Man. And with 29 characters that password is not easily brute-forced, either. (Okay, this one has special characters but it works just as well without them.)

    And it’s super easy to memorize even multiple passwords. You just need to remember song + offset, done.