Studying Users' Willingness to Use a Formally Verified Password Manager

Abstract

Password Managers (PMs) help users manage their passwords safely but many users do not trust them. To mitigate users' doubts, formal verification can be used. Formal verification can guarantee the absence of errors and make PMs more reliable. Nonetheless, the impact it has on the adoption of formally verified software is unknown. In previous work, we performed a preliminary user study which suggests that formal verification increases users’ willingness to use PMs. However, a large-scale study is required to confirm our findings. As such we designed and plan to deploy a large-scale study to confirm our previous work and gather further insight on users’ perceptions of formal verification in PMs.