Towards Improving the Usability of Password Managers

Abstract

Security experts strongly recommend the use of Password Managers (PMs). However, PMs are not widely used and studies indicate usability problems and distrust from users as the reasons for their low adoption. In this paper, we review usability challenges of PMs and we propose the use of known usability best practices and techniques to extend and improve Bitwarden, a widely-popular open-source PM. Since this work is done in the context of the PassCert project, which aims to build a formally verified PM, we also investigate ways to effectivelyconvey to users the formally verified properties. We report on preliminary results and we propose a methodology to evaluate our extension of Bitwarden and to determine the impact of formal verification on the adoption of PMs.