Scientists Have Create 10-day Repetition Test to teach people How To Remember COmplex Password

Scientist have researched how to remembering long, random combinations of phrases and numbers with a little mind training.

Microsoft Research's Stuart Schechter and Princeton University's Joseph Bonneau wanted to see how easy it would be for people to memorize very strong 56-bit random passwords.

They used a simple technique known as 'spaced repetition', which uses increasing intervals of time to revise previously learned material.

 

The researchers recruited participants from Amazon's Mechanical Turk crowdsourcing platform to take a fake series of attention tests.

 

But without the users knowing, they were in reality, studying how users logged in to the tests, according to a report in Motherboard. 

 

The program would prompt a user to type in a series of words or letters each time the login screen appeared. 

 

Over 10 days, the string of letters and words grew longer, until, the user had to type in 12 random letters or six random words to start the test.

 

Incredibly, the test subjects managed to type their password or passphrase without prompting after an average of 36 tries, with a success rate of 94 per cent.

 

After three days, 88 per cent still remembered the string or passphrase.

 

'There's a big dimension of human memory that hasn't been explored with passwords,' Joseph Bonneau, one of the two researchers who created the study, said at the time. 

 

'Human memory will surprise you.

 

But remembering long, complex passwords may not be enough to prevent hackers from stealing your information.

 

Source: Motherboard, Gettyimage mailonline