User practice of iStudent portal password policy / Normalina Ibrahim @ Mat Nor

Personal information and university information need to be protected, which requires that only authorized users gain access to the information. Text-based password is the commonly used as a method for authenticating users who attempt to access such information. Implementation of password policy from the system administrator of university prevents students from select a password that is too easy to guess. Furthermore the proper user practice influences the successfulness of password policy in terms of security and usability. Unfortunately, little are known about the relationship between user practice, forget and security in response to password policy. Thus the researcher investigated and analyzed the issues toward the implementation of password policy of iStudent portal at University Technology of MARA (UiTM) Shah Alam amongst postgraduate and undergraduate students. Survey via questionnaire was conducted for 400 samples of students and analyzed was done in quantitative method. There are 4 factors identified in user practice such as password handling, password composition, password storage and reuse and user sentiment and these factors were influenced by demographic. The factors of user practice had been analyzed using statistic methods such are Descriptive analysis, Wilcoxon test, Kruskal-Wallis, Logistic Regression Model and Chi Square test where the result was related with the forget and security issues. Then, several recommendations of guidelines were proposed for password policy that results in strong password without unduly burdening students. In conclusion, the result of analyzing and proposed guideline built eventually help the university to increase the security and usability in iStudents password policy for future improvement.