[psysec] Psychological basis for selective failure to recall passwords?

[Brian Snow]

I do not know of any directly applicable research to your question about
memory and passwords, and techniques to recall them; but the question
reminded me of the following story I was told by a friend who had to
remember many passwords professionally.

For some machines that he accessed rarely, and that allowed him to choose
the password, he would use "Forgotten".  That way, when he sat down at the
keyboard and tried to remember the password, he would have likely forgotten
it... which would cause him to smile, type, and enter the system...

Brian Snow

-----Original Message-----
From: psysec-bounces at whitestar.linuxbox.org
[mailto:psysec-bounces at whitestar.linuxbox.org] On Behalf Of Peter Gutmann
Sent: Saturday, May 02, 2009 7:45 AM
To: psysec at whitestar.linuxbox.org
Subject: [psysec] Psychological basis for selective failure to recall
passwords?

The subject is a bit generic, what I'm interested in specifically is the
phenomenon in which users can't recall the password for the current site or
machine but can recall lots of other passwords and try all of those in turn
to
see if one fits.  It seems to be a mixture of a failure of cued recall and
interference, with some tip-of-the-tongue (TOT) thrown in for good measure,
but that's just groping around in a bunch of potentially applicable
phenomena.
Does anyone know of any research that's directly applicable?

Peter.
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