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WSJ: What Keeps People From Using Password Managers?
No pay wall: https://archive.is/HCtcT
Many of us are vulnerable to hackers and eager to secure our online accounts, but lots of us also refuse to use an obvious solution: password managers.
Why? Our research has found that the typical reassurances and promises about password managers just don’t work. Fortunately, our research also suggests there are strategies that can persuade people to get past the psychological barriers and keep their data safe.
[...] In a study I conducted with my Ph.D. student Norah Alkaldi, we found that the two most common methods of persuasion were ineffective in getting people to adopt password managers. The first is the “push” approach—the idea that by showing people the dangers of using simple passwords, recording passwords on their computer or using the same passwords at different sites, we would push them to adopt a safer approach. Users, we found, don’t respond to the push strategy.
[...] The other, “pull,” approach—focusing on the positives of password managers—didn’t deliver any better results.
[...] We discovered two types of “mooring factors” that keep people from changing their behavior.
[...] First, there was the effort required to enter all your passwords into the password manager.
[...] People also fear they will lose all their passwords if they forget their master password.
(Score: 0) by Anonymous Coward on Friday June 18 2021, @10:58AM
First, it is a single point of failure. Password bases are usually stored in some backups - so theoretically there is a reliability protection in a backup and security protection - in manager's encryption.
However, with current state of PCs and code execution on rings -1 and -2, the encryption is questionable. Simultaneously reliability protection starts working against the security.
Additionally using the clipboard to move passwords is at least unresponsible.
What instead? The solution seems to be simple - just use system-wide driver for input device, this is a bit better in security, but the best would be to just thunk into form processing code. It was certainly possible in earlier Windows, as these all debugging tools could inspect other program's forms, but now it looks like it is forgotten. Even with many browsers being open source.