Related papers: DAHash: Distribution Aware Tuning of Password Hash…
An adversary who has obtained the cryptographic hash of a user's password can mount an offline attack to crack the password by comparing this hash value with the cryptographic hashes of likely password guesses. This offline attacker is…
We introduce password strength information signaling as a novel, yet counter-intuitive, defense mechanism against password cracking attacks. Recent breaches have exposed billions of user passwords to the dangerous threat of offline password…
Large-scale online password guessing attacks are wide-spread and continuously qualified as one of the top cyber-security risks. The common method for mitigating the risk of online cracking is to lock out the user after a fixed number ($K$)…
Offline attacks on passwords are increasingly commonplace and dangerous. An offline adversary is limited only by the amount of computational resources he or she is willing to invest to crack a user's password. The danger is compounded by…
Today, offline attacks are one of the most severe threats to password security. These attacks have claimed millions of passwords from prominent websites including Yahoo, LinkedIn, Twitter, Sony, Adobe and many more. Therefore, as a…
System passwords serve as critical credentials for user authentication and access control when logging into operating systems or applications. Upon entering a valid password, users pass verification to access system resources and execute…
The security of passwords depends on a thorough understanding of the strategies used by attackers. Unfortunately, real-world adversaries use pragmatic guessing tactics like dictionary attacks, which are difficult to simulate in password…
Even though passwords are the most convenient means of authentication, they bring along themselves the threat of dictionary attacks. Dictionary attacks may be of two kinds: online and offline. While offline dictionary attacks are possible…
In the past decade, billions of user passwords have been exposed to the dangerous threat of offline password cracking attacks. An offline attacker who has stolen the cryptographic hash of a user's password can check as many password guesses…
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…
Distributed systems often serve dynamic workloads and resource demands evolve over time. Such a temporal behavior stands in contrast to the static and demand-oblivious nature of most data structures used by these systems. In this paper, we…
Modern authentication systems store hashed values of passwords of users using cryptographic hash functions. Therefore, to crack a password an attacker needs to guess a hash function input that is mapped to the hashed value, as opposed to…
Given a specified average load factor, hash tables offer the appeal of constant time lookup operations. However, hash tables could face severe hash collisions because of malicious attacks, buggy applications, or even bursts of incoming…
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…
Considering computer systems, security is the major concern with usability. Security policies need to be developed to protect information from unauthorized access. Passwords and secrete codes used between users and information systems for…
The security of passwords is dependent on a thorough understanding of the strategies used by attackers. Unfortunately, real-world adversaries use pragmatic guessing tactics like dictionary attacks, which are difficult to simulate in…
Similar to a strategic interaction between rational and intelligent agents, cryptography problems can be examined through the prism of game theory. In this setting, the agent aiming to protect a message is called the defender, while the one…
We develop an economic model of an offline password cracker which allows us to make quantitative predictions about the fraction of accounts that a rational password attacker would crack in the event of an authentication server breach. We…
Choosing a hard-to-guess secret is a prerequisite in many security applications. Whether it is a password for user authentication or a secret key for a cryptographic primitive, picking it requires the user to trade-off usability costs with…
Cloud computing environments are increasingly vulnerable to security threats such as distributed denial-of-service (DDoS) attacks and SQL injection. Traditional security mechanisms, based on rule matching and feature recognition, struggle…