Related papers: Web password recovery --- a necessary evil?
Nowadays, advanced security mechanisms exist to protect data, systems, and networks. Most of these mechanisms are effective, and security experts can handle them to achieve a sufficient level of security for any given system. However, most…
User-chosen passwords remain essential to online security, and yet people continue to choose weak, insecure passwords. In this work, we investigate whether prospect theory, a behavioral model of how people evaluate risk, can provide…
In a brave new age of global connectivity and e-commerce, interconnections via networks have heightened, creating for both individuals and organizations, a state of complete dependence upon vulnerable systems for storage and transfer of…
Honeywords are decoy passwords that can be added to a credential database; if a login attempt uses a honeyword, this indicates that the site's credential database has been leaked. In this paper we explore the basic requirements for…
This paper reports on an incremental method that allows adding security mechanisms to an existing, but insecure system, such as a prototype or a legacy system. The incremental method is presented and as a showcase its application is…
The obstacles of each security system combined with the increase of cyber-attacks, negatively affect the effectiveness of network security management and rise the activities to be taken by the security staff and network administrators. So,…
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…
The growing use of large language models in sensitive domains has exposed a critical weakness: the inability to ensure that private information can be permanently forgotten. Yet these systems still lack reliable mechanisms to guarantee that…
It is practically impossible for users to memorize a large portfolio of strong and individual passwords for their online accounts. A solution is to generate passwords randomly and store them. Yet, storing passwords instead of memorizing…
This paper considers password generators, i.e. systems designed to generate site-specific passwords on demand. Such systems are an alternative to password managers. Over the last 15 years a range of password generator systems have been…
Passwords are a good idea, in theory. They have the potential to act as a fairly strong gateway. In practice though, passwords are plagued with problems. They are (1) easily shared, (2) trivial to observe and (3) maddeningly elusive when…
This work explores injection attacks against password managers. In this setting, the adversary (only) controls their own application client, which they use to "inject" chosen payloads to a victim's client via, for example, sharing…
The majority of systems rely on user authentication on passwords, but passwords have so many weaknesses and widespread use that easily raise significant security concerns, regardless of their encrypted form. Users hold the same password for…
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 advent of end-to-end encrypted (E2EE) messaging and backup services has brought new challenges for usable authentication. Compared to regular web services, the nature of E2EE implies that the provider cannot recover data for users who…
Safe memory reclamation is crucial to memory safety for optimistic and lock-free concurrent data structures in non garbage collected programming languages. However, several challenges arise in designing an ideal safe memory reclamation…
Password security has been compelled to evolve in response to the growing computational capabilities of modern systems. However, this evolution has often resulted in increasingly complex security practices that alienate users, leading to…
Advanced internet technologies providing services like e-mail, social networking, online banking, online shopping etc., have made day-to-day activities simple and convenient. Increasing dependency on the internet, convenience, and…
Security questions are one of the techniques used to recover passwords. The main limitation of security questions is that users find strong answers difficult to remember. This leads users to trade-off security for the convenience of an…
Due to the prevalence of online services in modern society, such as internet banking and social media, it is important for users to have an understanding of basic security measures in order to keep themselves safe online. However, users…