Modeling password distributions is a fundamental problem in password security, benefiting the research and applications on password guessing, password strength meters, honey password vaults, etc. As one of the best segment-based password models, WordPCFG has been proposed to capture individual semantic segments (called words) in passwords. However, we find WordPCFG does not address well the ambiguity of password segmentation by maximum matching, leading to the unreasonable segmentation of many password and further the inaccuracy of modeling password distributions. To address the ambiguity, we improve WordPCFG by maximum probability segmentation with A*-like pruning algorithm. The experimental results show that the improved WordPCFG cracks 99.26%–99.95% passwords, with nearly 5.67%–18.01% improvement.@en

To date there are few researches on the semantic information of passwords, which leaves a gap preventing us from fully understanding the passwords characteristic and security. We propose a new password probability model for semantic information based on Markov Chain with both generalization and accuracy, called WordMarkov, that can capture the semantic essence of password samples. Further, we evaluate our design via password guessing attacks, on six real-world datasets, and we show that WordMarkov obtains 24.29%–67.37% improvement over the state-of-the-art password probability models. Even more surprising is that WordMarkov achieves 75.35%–96.34% attack improvement on "long" passwords, indicating the importance of semantic parts in long passwords.@en

Passwords have been widely used in online authentication, and they form the front line that protects our data security and privacy. But the security of password may be easily harmed by insecure password generator. Massive reports state that users are always keen to generate new passwords by reusing or fine-tuning old secrets. Once an old password is leaked, the users may suffer from credential tweaking attacks. We propose a password reuse model PassTrans and simulate credential tweaking attacks. We evaluate the performance in leaked password datasets, and the results show that 67.51% of accounts is breakable under 1,000 guesses, indicating our model is accurate in capturing password reuse behavior.@en

Probabilistic context-free grammars (PCFGs) have been pro-posed to capture password distributions, and further been used in password guessing attacks and password strength meters. However, current PCFGs suffer from the limitation of inaccurate segmentation of password, which leads to misestimation of password probability and thus seriously affects their performance. In this paper, we propose a word extraction approach for passwords, and further present an improved PCFG model, called WordPCFG. The WordPCFG using word extraction method can precisely extract semantic segments (called word) from passwords based on cohesion and freedom of words. We evaluate our WordPCFG on six large-scale datasets, showing that WordPCFG cracks 83.04%–95.47% passwords and obtains 12.96%–71.84% improvement over the state-of-the-art PCFGs.@en

Password vault applications allow a user to store multiple passwords in a vault and choose a master password to encrypt the vault. In practice, attackers may steal the storage file of the vault and further compromise all stored passwords by offline guessing the master password. Honey vaults have been proposed to address the threat. By producing plausible-looking decoy vaults for wrong master passwords, honey vaults force attackers to shift offline guessing to online verifications. However, the existing honey vault schemes all suffer from intersection attacks in the multi-leakage case where an old version of the storage file (e.g., a backup) is stolen along with the current version. The attacker can offline identify the decoys and completely break the schemes. We design a generic construction based on a multi-similar-password model and further propose an incremental update mechanism. With our mechanism, the attacker cannot get any extra advantages from the old storage, and therefore degenerates to an attacker only with knowledge of the current version. To further evaluate the security in the traditional single-leakage case where only the current version is stolen, we investigate the theoretically optimal strategy for online verifications, and propose practical attacks. Targeting the existing schemes, our attacks crack 33%-55% of real vaults via only one-time online guess and achieve 85%-94% accuracy in distinguishing real vaults from decoys. In contrast, our design reduces the values of the two metrics to 2% and 58% (close to the ideal values 0% and 50%), respectively. This indicates that the attackers needs to carry out 2.8x-7.5x online verifications to break our scheme.

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Multi-factor authentication (MFA) has been widely used to safeguard high-value assets. Unlike single-factor authentication (e.g., password-only login), t-factor authentication (tFA) requires a user always to carry and present t specified factors so as to strengthen the security of login. Nevertheless, this may restrict user experience in limiting the flexibility of factor usage, e.g., the user may prefer to choose any factors at hand for login authentication. To bring back usability and flexibility without loss of security, we introduce a new notion of authentication, called (t, n) threshold MFA, that allows a user to actively choose t factors out of n based on preference. We further define the “most-rigorous” multi-factor security model for the new notion, allowing attackers to control public channels, launch active/passive attacks, and compromise/corrupt any subset of parties as well as factors. We state that the model can capture the most practical security needs in the literature. We design a threshold MFA key exchange (T-MFAKE) protocol built on the top of a threshold oblivious pseudorandom function and an authenticated key exchange protocol. Our protocol achieves the “highest-attainable” security against all attacking attempts in the context of parties/factors being compromised/corrupted. As for efficiency, our design only requires 4+t exponentiations, 2 multi-exponentiations and 2 communication rounds. Compared with existing tFA schemes, even the degenerated (t, t) version of our protocol achieves the strongest security (stronger than most schemes) and higher efficiency on computational and communication. We instantiate our design on real-world platform to highlight its practicability and efficiency.

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