Security fails the masses by design

In studying other subjects the idea of functional art was a common theme. Imagine a glass door along a glass wall in a peaceful room. There are few surfaces in the room, so you're struck with the lines of the floor meeting the wall, wall meeting the ceiling, etc. To keep with the theme you place a single horizontal metal bar on the door as the handle. Elegant and beautiful in its simplicity.

Now do you push or pull that door to get out?

The flaw is in the design itself, and the attempt to keep things simple causes a complexity for each new person that tries to exit.

A password is just that. A shared secret word that is likely common in the spoken language. It can be remembered without writing it down or used in a sentence. This password is also considered insecure in modern computing systems.

Instead of passwords most systems have migrated to an authentication token. Typically a string of characters including upper and lower case, special symbols, and numbers. While this string may resemble a word to make memorization easier, it is not actually a word. However a confusion still exists with many new users, who are presented with the request to create a password, and select something like "pencil".

The issue is in the fact that the design hasn't been changed. It's still called a password, and the essential implementation hasn't changed. There's still a horizontal bar on the door, but now there's a sticker that says pull.

Responsibility should be taken to understand these fundamental design flaws as we come across them in practice. and wherever possible, resist the temptation to fix the problem with a sign or a memo. This requires more effort and time, and will not always be possible, but a goal to be pursued none the less.