Validating an Agent-Based Model of Human Password Behavior

Effective reasoning about the impact of security policy decisions requires understanding how human users actually behave, rather than assuming desirable but incorrect behavior. Simulation could help with this reasoning, but it requires building computational models of the relevant human behavior and validating that these models match what humans actually do. In this paper we describe our progress on building agent-based models of human behavior with passwords, and we demonstrate how these models reproduce phenomena shown in the empirical literature.