Password Managers—It’s All about Trust and Transparency

Abstract

A password is considered to be the first line of defence in protecting online accounts, but there are problems when people handle their own passwords, for example, password reuse and difficult to memorize. Password managers appear to be a promising solution to help people handle their passwords. However, there is low adoption of password managers, even though they are widely available, and there are fewer studies on users of password managers. Therefore, the issues that cause people not to use password managers must be investigated and, more generally, what users think about them and the user interfaces of password managers. In this paper, we report three studies that we conducted: on user interfaces and the functions of three password managers; a usability test and an interview study; and an online questionnaire study about users and non-users of password managers, which also compares experts and non-experts regarding their use (or non-use) of password managers. Our findings show that usability is not a major problem, rather lack of trust and transparency are the main reasons for the low adoption of password managers. Users of password managers have trust and security concerns, while there are a few issues with the user interfaces and functions of password managers.