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Register a new userHuman-Usable Password Schemas: Beyond Information-Theoretic Security
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Added by
Elan Rosenfeld
Publication date
2019
fields
Informatics Engineering
and research's language is
English
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Password users frequently employ passwords that are too simple, or they just reuse passwords for multiple websites. A common complaint is that utilizing secure passwords is too difficult. One possible solution to this problem is to use a password schema. Password schemas are deterministic functions which map challenges (typically the website name) to responses (passwords). Previous work has been done on developing and analyzing publishable schemas, but these analyses have been information-theoretic, not complexity-theoretic; they consider an adversary with infinite computing power. We perform an analysis with respect to adversaries having currently achievable computing capabilities, assessing the realistic practical security of such schemas. We prove for several specific schemas that a computer is no worse off than an infinite adversary and that it can successfully extract all information from leaked challenges and their respective responses, known as challenge-response pairs. We also show that any schema that hopes to be secure against adversaries with bounded computation should obscure information in a very specific way, by introducing many possible constraints with each challenge-response pair. These surprising results put the analyses of password schemas on a more solid and practical footing.
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The Government of Bangladesh is aggressively transforming its public service landscape by transforming public services into online services via a number of websites. The motivation is that this would be a catalyst for a transformative change in every aspect of citizen life. Some web services must be protected from any unauthorised usages and passwords remain the most widely used credential mechanism for this purpose. However, if passwords are not adopted properly, they can be a cause for security breach. That is why it is important to study different aspects of password security on different websites. In this paper, we present a study of password security among 36 different Bangladeshi government websites against six carefully chosen password security heuristics. This study is the first of its kind in this domain and offers interesting insights. For example, many websites have not adopted proper security measures with respect to security. There is no password construction guideline adopted by many websites, thus creating a barrier for users to select a strong password. Some of them allow supposedly weak passwords and still do not utilise a secure HTTPS channel to transmit information over the Internet.
This paper summarizes recent contributions of the authors and their co-workers in the area of information-theoretic security.
In recent decades, criminals have increasingly used the web to research, assist and perpetrate criminal behaviour. One of the most important ways in which law enforcement can battle this growing trend is through accessing pertinent information about suspects in a timely manner. A significant hindrance to this is the difficulty of accessing any system a suspect uses that requires authentication via password. Password guessing techniques generally consider common user behaviour while generating their passwords, as well as the password policy in place. Such techniques can offer a modest success rate considering a large/average population. However, they tend to fail when focusing on a single target -- especially when the latter is an educated user taking precautions as a savvy criminal would be expected to do. Open Source Intelligence is being increasingly leveraged by Law Enforcement in order to gain useful information about a suspect, but very little is currently being done to integrate this knowledge in an automated way within password cracking. The purpose of this research is to delve into the techniques that enable the gathering of the necessary context about a suspect and find ways to leverage this information within password guessing techniques.
Android unlock patterns remain quite common. Our study, as well as others, finds that roughly 25% of respondents use a pattern when unlocking their phone. Despite known security issues, the design of the pattern interface remains unchanged since first launch. We propose Double Patterns, a natural and easily adoptable advancement on Android unlock patterns that maintains the core design features, but instead of selecting a single pattern, a user selects two, concurrent Android unlock patterns entered one-after-the-other super-imposed on the same 3x3 grid. We evaluated Double Patterns for both security and usability by conducting an online study with $n=634$ participants in three treatments: a control treatment, a first pattern entry blocklist, and a blocklist for both patterns. We find that in all settings, user chosen Double Patterns are more secure than traditional patterns based on standard guessability metrics, more similar to that of 4-/6-digit PINs, and even more difficult to guess for a simulated attacker. Users express positive sentiments in qualitative feedback, particularly those who currently (or previously) used Android unlock patterns, and overall, participants found the Double Pattern interface quite usable, with high recall retention and comparable entry times to traditional patterns. In particular, current Android pattern users, the target population for Double Patterns, reported SUS scores in the 80th percentile and high perceptions of security and usability in responses to open- and closed-questions. Based on these findings, we would recommend adding Double Patterns as an advancement to Android patterns, much like allowing for added PIN length.
Off-chain protocols constitute one of the most promising approaches to solve the inherent scalability issue of blockchain technologies. The core idea is to let parties transact on-chain only once to establish a channel between them, leveraging later on the resulting channel paths to perform arbitrarily many peer-to-peer transactions off-chain. While significant progress has been made in terms of proof techniques for off-chain protocols, existing approaches do not capture the game-theoretic incentives at the core of their design, which led to overlooking significant attack vectors like the Wormhole attack in the past. This work introduces the first game-theoretic model that is expressive enough to reason about the security of off-chain protocols. We advocate the use of Extensive Form Games - EFGs and introduce two instances of EFGs to capture security properties of the closing and the routing of the Lightning Network. Specifically, we model the closing protocol, which relies on punishment mechanisms to disincentivize the uploading on-chain of old channel states, as well as the routing protocol, thereby formally characterizing the Wormhole attack, a vulnerability that undermines the fee-based incentive mechanism underlying the Lightning Network.
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