About the Project
The Practice using Passwords project has developed lessons and tools to help older people create and use stronger passwords. By combining an introductory lesson on passwords with an interactive training site users can learn about how to generate secure passwords and then practice registering on a website and then signing in with passwords, security codes and CAPTCHAs.
This video gives an overview of the materials created for the Practice Using Passwords project. It describes the five lessons we developed that covers an introduction to passwords and interactive opportunities to practice using passwords.
Below you will find links to a series of lessons, which contain all the facilitated learning materials to support each of the lessons and demonstration videos showing the training site in action. All the material and the interactive training site are available for download.
Our training site has been developed to work entirely within the browser without the need for a remote server. We have created a sandboxed environment, including a simulated email account, to allow users to practice in a safe environment. The source code for our training site is open source and consists of static HTML, JavaScript and CSS. It can be mirrored on other websites to allow inclusion within existing training and outreach.
Background
This project was led by the University of Surrey and was funded by the National Centre for Cyber Security through one of its Academic Centre of Excellence in Cyber Security Education projects.
The project engaged with stakeholders from several charity organisations including Surrey Coalition for Disabled People and Action for Carers. The project team are grateful for their support during the project.
We held several engagement workshops to understand what is driving older people to go online, how comfortable they are online, how confident they are completing their online activities, for example online shopping and banking. We sought to understand the support environments available to older people so that we could develop material that could be used by this support network of people and by people on an individual basis.
We co-created a focus for the project based around password security since it is key to the activities of managing online activities. The aim of the project was to develop material to help people understand how to set up and use passwords with a particular emphasis on reinforcing this learning in a practical and safe way.
Project Team
- Professor Helen Treharne (project lead)
- Dr Emily Corrigan Kavanagh
- Professor David Frohlich
- Dr Andrew Rogoyski
- Dr Chris Culnane (Castellate Consulting)
Contact Us
Contact us by emailing h.treharne@surrey.ac.uk