About
The goal of our project is to determine what makes a password usable and secure and to examine existing password schemes (specifically, comp8 passwords) and find which ones meet those criteria and which do not. This paper aims to extend the findings of a previous study (Kraus et al., 2017) into a more generalizable context. This previous study proposed an emoji authentication system called EmojiAuth as a secure and usable alternative for mobile PIN authentication. Our paper builds on their research and compares emoji password systems to the traditional comp8 password scheme. In contrast to the original study, there was little evidence that an emoji password was more secure or usable than the traditional password. However, an intersection of comp8 and emoji passwords emerged as a possible alternative, these were what we referred to as ‘combo’ passwords, mixed passwords that included both traditional password characters and emojis, and were relatively more secure and usable than either of the two.
