Authentication Routines Among College Students

Understanding users’ experiences with authentication is key to developing usable and secure systems, especially in contexts where security risks are high. We conduct a survey and time-diary study ( N = 21) at a large public university to understand the timing and overhead of daily authentication activities across devices and settings. Our findings reveal that people are required to authenticate three times more often than a decade ago (an average of 76 times per day), with an average authentication time overhead of 13.9 min per day. The majority (90.5%) of participants reported frustration with authentication, and 61.9% reported at least one problematic authentication experience that increased their daily temporal and cognitive overhead.