This study investigated the security gains of using a multilingual passphrase policy in user generated passphrases that are based on African and Indo-European languages. The research on passwords has been largely focused on the Global North where English is often the first or only language. Targeted password guessing of English and Chinese-based passwords shows that a user’s mother tongue language can influence password structure, something that reflects on security. Given a multilingual user group, for example in Africa, it is interesting to establish whether such a population can generate secure multilingual passphrases. Accordingly, the findings of this study could be extrapolated to other contexts with multilingual users. The results show that English language-oriented passwords dominated the short password corpora. Moreover, the use of a multilingual passphrase policy reduced the dominance of English language-oriented passwords. Further analysis shows that short passwords oriented towards an Indo-European language were easier to guess when compared to short passwords based on African languages. Hence, this study encourages orienting passwords to other languages, with the use of a multilingual passphrase policy expected to offer more security.
Research on the effectiveness of cyber security awareness in ICS Risk Assessment Frameworks
Assessing security awareness among users is essential for protecting industrial control systems (ICSs) from social...