Thoughts On: Datagenics - Pin Number Analysis
This is an excellent article on 4 digit passwords:
http://www.datagenetics.com/blog/september32012/index.html
Observations
The ability to look at data visually is excellent and the common sense insights that they show are also interesting. Basically there are some obvious ones:
- People like to choose repeating numbers
- People like to choose dates (either years or month/day). These dates are important to them or important historically
One observation was a little less obvious to me:
- People like to choose numbers close to each other: 23 is more common than 29. The distance between 2 and 3 is 1 and the distance between 2 and 9 is 7. I didn't realize this.
I only have a handful of pin numbers and I can see this bias in my own choice.
Given that there aren't a lot of choices I started using a random number generator to pick them. I use a password program to remember them for me.
Additional ideas
Another technique that isn't analyzed is using a 4 letter word and a keypad:
For the older people in the audience phones had letters on their keypads. So phone numbers could be words like 1-800-RIP-OFFF. Or something like that.
Here is the chart:
1: (often blank, may have special functions like voicemail)
2: A, B, C
3: D, E, F
4: G, H, I
5: J, K, L
6: M, N, O
7: P, Q, R, S
8: T, U, V
9: W, X, Y, Z
For example the work "JUNK" would be 5865. This could also be tested in their visualization. Get all the 4 character passwords, convert the characters to their number equivalent and see how they show up.