An Investigation of the Effectiveness and Security of Passwords Derived from African Languages
Authors: Sibusiso Sishi

Date: November 20 2018
Publication: PasswordsCon 2018 Stockholm
Source: Currently no known Internet copy of paper.

Abstract or Summary:
There have been several studies on country based passwords by Dell’Amico et al. (2010) and by Li et al. (2014) who looked at Finnish, Italian and Chinese, English passwords respectively, but there has been a lack of focused study on
the type of passwords that are being created in Africa. English is the business language in South Africa and therefore some users may create passwords in English even though their mother tongue may be isiZulu or isiXhosa. If users are taught to use their indigenous languages for passwords can this increase the organisations password security posture?

We took weak English passwords and converted them to eight Southern African languages to test their effectiveness against online password crackers. This was also done to test which Southern African language is the most susceptible to being attacked and which is not.


PasswordResearch.com Note: Video of presentation: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=ZQYFp4fzpyE


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