Related papers: Memory-only selection of dictionary PINs

Passwords are the most common mechanism for authenticating users online. However, studies have shown that users find it difficult to create and manage secure passwords. To that end, passphrases are often recommended as a usable alternative…

Password security hinges on an in-depth understanding of the techniques adopted by attackers. Unfortunately, real-world adversaries resort to pragmatic guessing strategies such as dictionary attacks that are inherently difficult to model in…

Memory-based learning, keeping full memory of learning material, appears a viable approach to learning NLP tasks, and is often superior in generalisation accuracy to eager learning approaches that abstract from learning material. Here we…

Despite numerous countermeasures proposed by practitioners and researchers, remote control-flow alteration of programs with memory-safety vulnerabilities continues to be a realistic threat. Guaranteeing that complex software is completely…

Gesture and signature passwords are two-dimensional figures created by drawing on the surface of a touchscreen with one or more fingers. Prior results about their security have used resilience to either shoulder surfing, a human observation…

Password guessers are instrumental for assessing the strength of passwords. Despite their diversity and abundance, little is known about how different guessers compare to each other. We perform in-depth analyses and comparisons of the…

Given a collection of strings, each with an associated probability of occurrence, the guesswork of each of them is their position in a list ordered from most likely to least likely, breaking ties arbitrarily. Guesswork is central to several…

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…

21st Century citizens are faced with the need to remember numbers of PINs (Personal Identification Numbers) in order to do their daily business, and they often have difficulties due to human memory limitations. One way of helping them could…

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…

This research investigates the role of passwords and passphrases as valid authentication methodologies. Specifically, this research dispels earlier work that ignores information-theoretic lessons learned from cognitive and social psychology…

We study language generation in the limit under bounded memory. In this task, a learner observes examples from an unknown target language one at a time and must eventually output only new valid examples. Prior work assumes access to the…

Personal Identification Numbers (PINs) are widely used as an access control mechanism for digital assets (e.g., smartphones), financial assets (e.g., ATM cards), and physical assets (e.g., locks for garage doors or homes). Using…

Word sense disambiguation algorithms, with few exceptions, have made use of only one lexical knowledge source. We describe a system which performs unrestricted word sense disambiguation (on all content words in free text) by combining…

Passphrases offer an alternative to traditional passwords which aim to be stronger and more memorable. However, users tend to choose short passphrases with predictable patterns that may reduce the security they offer. To explore the…

The complexity of a system description is a function of the entropy of its symbolic description. Prior to computing the entropy of the system description, an observation scale has to be assumed. In natural language texts, typical scales are…

Strong passwords are fundamental to the security of password-based user authentication systems. In recent years, much effort has been made to evaluate password strength or to generate strong passwords. Unfortunately, the usability or…

Multiple studies have probed representations emerging in neural networks trained for end-to-end NLP tasks and examined what word-level linguistic information may be encoded in the representations. In classical probing, a classifier is…

The Guesswork problem was originally motivated by a desire to quantify computational security for single user systems. Leveraging recent results from its analysis, we extend the remit and utility of the framework to the quantification of…

We consider the problem of constructing an unconditionally secure cipher with a short key for the case where the probability distribution of encrypted messages is unknown. Note that unconditional security means that an adversary with no…