Personalized password guessing: a new security threat

ABSTRACT

This paper presents a model for generating personalized passwords (i.e., passwords based on user and service profile). A user's password is generated from a list of personalized words, each word is drawn from a topic relating to a user and the service in use. The proposed model can be applied to: (i) assess the strength of a password (i.e., determine how many guesses are used to crack the password), and (ii) generate secure (i.e., contains digits, special characters, or capitalized characters) yet easy to memorize passwords.

References

1. Das, A., Bonneau, J., Caesar, M., Borisov, N., and Wang, X. The Tangled Web of Password Reuse. In NDSS (2014).
2. Koller, D., and Friedman, N. Probabilistic graphical models: principles and techniques. MIT press, 2009.
3. Yan, J. J., Blackwell, A. F., Anderson, R. J., and Grant, A. Password memorability and security: Empirical results. IEEE Security & privacy 2, 5 (2004), 25--31.

Index Terms

• Security and privacy

  • Systems security

    • Operating systems security