Related papers: Investigating the Distribution of Password Choices

Leaks from password datasets are a regular occurrence. An organization may defend a leak with reassurances that just a small subset of passwords were taken. In this paper we show that the leak of a relatively small number of text-based…

A central challenge in password security is to characterize the attacker's guessing curve i.e., what is the probability that the attacker will crack a random user's password within the first $G$ guesses. A key challenge is that the guessing…

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…

A password composition policy restricts the space of allowable passwords to eliminate weak passwords that are vulnerable to statistical guessing attacks. Usability studies have demonstrated that existing password composition policies can…

In this study, we investigate whether speech symbols, learned through deep learning, follow Zipf's law, akin to natural language symbols. Zipf's law is an empirical law that delineates the frequency distribution of words, forming…

Zipf's law in its basic incarnation is an empirical probability distribution governing the frequency of usage of words in a language. As Terence Tao recently remarked, it still lacks a convincing and satisfactory mathematical explanation.…

Zipf's law has been found in many human-related fields, including language, where the frequency of a word is persistently found as a power law function of its frequency rank, known as Zipf's law. However, there is much dispute whether it is…

We present empirical data on frequency and pattern of misprints in citations to twelve high-profile papers. We find that the distribution of misprints, ranked by frequency of their repetition, follows Zipf's law. We propose a stochastic…

With Zipf's law being originally and most famously observed for word frequency, it is surprisingly limited in its applicability to human language, holding over no more than three to four orders of magnitude before hitting a clear break in…

The frequencies at which individual words occur across languages follow power law distributions, a pattern of findings known as Zipf's law. A vast literature argues over whether this serves to optimize the efficiency of human communication,…

Large-scale password data breaches are becoming increasingly commonplace, which has enabled researchers to produce a substantial body of password security research utilising real-world password datasets, which often contain numbers of…

As network security issues continue gaining prominence, password security has become crucial in safeguarding personal information and network systems. This study first introduces various methods for system password cracking, outlines…

The choice of password composition policy to enforce on a password-protected system represents a critical security decision, and has been shown to significantly affect the vulnerability of user-chosen passwords to guessing attacks. In…

Password advice is constantly circulated by standards agencies, companies, websites and specialists. But there appears to be great diversity in terms of the advice that is given. Users have noticed that different websites are enforcing…

We perform a quantitative analysis of extensive chess databases and show that the frequencies of opening moves are distributed according to a power-law with an exponent that increases linearly with the game depth, whereas the pooled…

The word-frequency distribution provides the fundamental building blocks that generate discourse in language. It is well known, from empirical evidence, that the word-frequency distribution of almost any text is described by Zipf's law, at…

In his pioneering research, G. K. Zipf observed that more frequent words tend to have more meanings, and showed that the number of meanings of a word grows as the square root of its frequency. He derived this relationship from two…

Zipf's law is well known in linguistics: the frequency of a word is inversely proportional to its rank. This is a special case of a more general power law, a common phenomenon in many kinds of real-world statistical data. Here, it is shown…

Researchers have extensively explored how password creation policies influence the security and usability of user-chosen passwords, producing evidence-based policy guidelines. However, for web authentication to improve in practice, websites…

The Zipf's law is the major regularity of statistical linguistics that served as a prototype for rank-frequency relations and scaling laws in natural sciences. Here we show that the Zipf's law -- together with its applicability for a single…