Related papers: Finding passwords by random walks: How long does i…
In this work, we present a quantum query algorithm for searching a word of length $m$ in an unsorted dictionary of size $n$. The algorithm uses $O(\sqrt{n})$ queries (Grover operators), like previously known algorithms. What is new is that…
The aim of this work is to study the evolution of password selection among users. We investigate whether users follow best practices when selecting passwords and identify areas in need of improvement. Four distinct publicly-available…
Imagine a phone directory containing N names arranged in completely random order. In order to find someone's phone number with a 50% probability, any classical algorithm (whether deterministic or probabilistic) will need to look at a…
Two words $w_1$ and $w_2$ are said to be $k$-binomial equivalent if every non-empty word $x$ of length at most $k$ over the alphabet of $w_1$ and $w_2$ appears as a scattered factor of $w_1$ exactly as many times as it appears as a…
Designing short DNA words is a problem of constructing a set (i.e., code) of n DNA strings (i.e., words) with the minimum length such that the Hamming distance between each pair of words is at least k and the n words satisfy a set of…
We consider random walks on the set of all words over a finite alphabet such that in each step only the last two letters of the current word may be modified and only one letter may be adjoined or deleted. We assume that the transition…
The claw finding problem has been studied in terms of query complexity as one of the problems closely connected to cryptography. For given two functions, f and g, as an oracle which have domains of size N and M (N<=M), respectively, and the…
Grammar-based compression, where one replaces a long string by a small context-free grammar that generates the string, is a simple and powerful paradigm that captures many popular compression schemes. Given a grammar, the random access…
Given a pattern string $P$ of length $n$ consisting of $\delta$ distinct characters and a query string $T$ of length $m$, where the characters of $P$ and $T$ are drawn from an alphabet $\Sigma$ of size $\Delta$, the {\em exact string…
Although it is common for users to select bad passwords that can be easily cracked by attackers, password-based authentication remains the most widely-used method. To encourage users to select good passwords, enterprises often enforce…
Suppose we want to seek the longest common subsequences (LCSs) of two strings as informative patterns that explain the relationship between the strings. The dynamic programming algorithm gives us a table from which all LCSs can be extracted…
Quantum mechanics can speed up a range of search applications over unsorted data. For example imagine a phone directory containing N names arranged in completely random order. To find someone's phone number with a probability of 50%, any…
The classical combinatorics-based password strength formula provides a result in tens of bits, whereas the NIST Entropy Estimation Suite give a result between 0 and 1 for Min-entropy. In this work, we present a newly developed metric --…
We engineer an algorithm to solve the approximate dictionary matching problem. Given a list of words $\mathcal{W}$, maximum distance $d$ fixed at preprocessing time and a query word $q$, we would like to retrieve all words from…
In this work, we consider the problem of pattern matching under the dynamic time warping (DTW) distance motivated by potential applications in the analysis of biological data produced by the third generation sequencing. To measure the DTW…
We describe a password generation scheme based on Markov models built from English text (specifically, Charles Dickens' *A Tale Of Two Cities*). We show a (linear-running-time) bijection between random bitstrings of any desired length and…
We introduce quantitative usability and security models to guide the design of password management schemes --- systematic strategies to help users create and remember multiple passwords. In the same way that security proofs in cryptography…
Given two sequences over a finite alphabet $\mathcal{L}$, the $D_2$ statistic is the number of $m$-letter word matches between the two sequences. This statistic is used in bioinformatics for expressed sequence tag database searches. Here we…
Tree search is a fundamental tool for planning, as many sequential decision-making problems can be framed as searching over tree-structured spaces. We propose an uncertainty-guided tree search algorithm for settings where the reward…
On the premise that we are using passwords composed of multiple English words, we argue that using syntactically correct passphrases has no significant impact on the security in comparison to randomly arranged collections of words. We only…