Password Security Science Fair Projects

Project Title

Powerful Passwords: An Evaluation of Password Security

Purpose

The purpose of this project is to investigate which kinds of passwords are most secure. Based on the literature that I read I hypothesize that passwords that are longer and contain symbols, spaces, capital letters, and numbers will be the most effective.

Procedure

First I asked 4 people to create 84 different passwords, 16 passwords of 6 different types. The different types were 1-4 character words, 5-8 character words, 3 character letter and number combinations, 4 character letter and number combinations, 3 character letter/number/symbol combinations, and 4 character letter/number/symbol combinations. Each of the passwords was used to protect a Word document file. Next I used Advanced Word 2000 Password Recovery, a password cracking program, to try to crack each of the passwords on the Word files. Then I recorded the time it took to crack each password.

Conclusion

This study demonstrated that whenever a person is trying to keep something safe with a password, they need to choose the password carefully. I accepted my hypothesis that passwords that were longer and contained symbols, letters, and numbers would be the most effective. My results showed that my original hypothesis was correct. Thus the most randomly generated passwords worked the best while English dictionary words worked the worst. This shows that when a person is trying to protect themselves, they should try to use the most obscure password possible. Even using roots of easily guessed words can be harmful. If a hacker is able to guess part of the password, they can use it as a pin in the cracking program, thus allowing for a huge decrease in the amount of time needed to complete the crack. If people really want to protect themselves, they should try to use the most long and complicated password that they can remember.