An Empirical Study on the Web Password Strength in Greece

Text passwords are commonly used for user authentication in the web. There is lately a strong interest for case studies on the password habits of populations with different cultures and/or languages. In this paper, we augment the existing literature with a case study of Greek web sites. We analyze clear text and encrypted passwords for almost 19,000 accounts and we draw conclusions on similarities with and oppositions to alike empirical studies. Our findings indicate that a significant percentage of users chooses easily-guessed passwords. The average password length is less than 7 characters and most passwords contain only letters and numbers. However, there are users that prefer passwords containing characters from the Greek alphabet. Such passwords are much harder to guess and our proposal is to encourage their usage.