Presentation
Authentication Routines Among College Students
SessionThursday Poster Session
DescriptionHow long do you spend authenticating each day? User authentication mechanisms have become an essential requirement in recent years as the sheer volume of information created and managed daily continues to grow across a number of services, from high-traffic websites to large educational institutions. Yet despite its prevalence, prior work has largely addressed authentication usability in discrete contexts, rather than examined how long routine authentication actually takes for the services and physical resources accessed daily. Moreover, the few relevant prior work findings are largely outdated and conducted at a time when the average user managed far fewer credentials, accounts, and devices. Motivated by this gap, we conducted a time-diary study at a large public university to characterize the frequency and timing of daily authentication events. Our findings reveal that people are required to authenticate three times more often than a decade ago (53 times per day), a frequency most participants themselves underestimated. The median authentication overhead is 6 minutes per day. Furthermore, 92% of participants reported frustration with authentication, and 59% recorded at least one problematic authentication experience that added to their daily temporal and cognitive overhead.
Contributor
Alternate Presenter
Event Type
Poster
TimeThursday, October 22nd5:30pm - 6:30pm PDT
Location