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Øpass: Zero-storage Password Management Based on Password Reminders

Published: 23 April 2018 Publication History

Abstract

A plethora of Internet services and applications require user authentication. Although many alternatives have been proposed, and despite the significant advancement in attackers' capabilities to perform password cracking, the most attractive authentication technology today, is still text-based passwords.
The last years, there is a rapid increase in the number of web services a user accesses in their everyday life. Most of these services (e.g., online shops, OSNs, chat clients, etc.) require their very own password, thus increasing the burden of password management on the user side. In this paper, we propose Øpass, a novel system that combines ideas from existing authentication methods, to offer a user-friendly mechanism to securely maintain accounts. Øpass works as a password manager, but it requires zero storage for the passwords: no password will ever get stored either in the user's device, or in a third-party database.
We implement Øpass as an extension for the popular Google Chrome browser, and we evaluate it by using the popular business-oriented social networking service LinkedIn. Early results from our performance tests show that Øpass, using a proactive strategy, can achieve more than 2 orders of magnitude better performance than the current state-of-the-art authentication mechanism.

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  1. Øpass: Zero-storage Password Management Based on Password Reminders

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      cover image ACM Conferences
      EuroSec'18: Proceedings of the 11th European Workshop on Systems Security
      April 2018
      53 pages
      ISBN:9781450356527
      DOI:10.1145/3193111
      Permission to make digital or hard copies of part or all of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for third-party components of this work must be honored. For all other uses, contact the Owner/Author.

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      New York, NY, United States

      Publication History

      Published: 23 April 2018

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      Author Tags

      1. Password Management
      2. Password Reminders
      3. User Authentication

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      • Demonstration
      • Research
      • Refereed limited

      Funding Sources

      • Marie SkBodowska-Curie Actions - European Commission

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      EuroSys '18
      Sponsor:
      EuroSys '18: Thirteenth EuroSys Conference 2018
      April 23 - 26, 2018
      Porto, Portugal

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      EuroSec'18 Paper Acceptance Rate 8 of 19 submissions, 42%;
      Overall Acceptance Rate 47 of 113 submissions, 42%

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