Studies of Keyboard Patterns in Passwords: Recognition, Characteristics and Strength Evolution.

Keyboard patterns are widely used in password construction, as they can be easily memorized with the aid of positions on the keyboard. Consequently, keyboard-pattern-based passwords has being the target in many dictionary attack models. However, most of the existing researches relies only on recognition methods defining keyboard pattern structures empirically or even manually. As a result, only those infamous keyboard patterns such as qwerty are recognized and many potential structures are not specified. Besides, there are limited studies focusing on the characteristics of keyboard patterns.