Title
Targeted Online Password Guessing: An Underestimated Threat.
Abstract
While trawling online/offline password guessing has been intensively studied, only a few studies have examined targeted online guessing, where an attacker guesses a specific victim's password for a service, by exploiting the victim's personal information such as one sister password leaked from her another account and some personally identifiable information (PII). A key challenge for targeted online guessing is to choose the most effective password candidates, while the number of guess attempts allowed by a server's lockout or throttling mechanisms is typically very small. We propose TarGuess, a framework that systematically characterizes typical targeted guessing scenarios with seven sound mathematical models, each of which is based on varied kinds of data available to an attacker. These models allow us to design novel and efficient guessing algorithms. Extensive experiments on 10 large real-world password datasets show the effectiveness of TarGuess. Particularly, TarGuess I~IV capture the four most representative scenarios and within 100 guesses: (1) TarGuess-I outperforms its foremost counterpart by 142% against security-savvy users and by 46% against normal users; (2) TarGuess-II outperforms its foremost counterpart by 169% on security-savvy users and by 72% against normal users; and (3) Both TarGuess-III and IV gain success rates over 73% against normal users and over 32% against security-savvy users. TarGuess-III and IV, for the first time, address the issue of cross-site online guessing when given the victim's one sister password and some PII.
Year
DOI
Venue
2016
10.1145/2976749.2978339
ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security
Keywords
Field
DocType
Password authentication, Targeted online guessing, Personal information, Password reuse, Probabilistic model
Zero-knowledge password proof,Internet privacy,Password cracking,Password strength,Computer security,Computer science,S/KEY,One-time password,Password policy,Password,Cognitive password
Conference
Citations 
PageRank 
References 
44
1.24
19
Authors
5
Name
Order
Citations
PageRank
Ding Wang111011.77
Zhang Zijian25710.32
Ping Wang314914.37
Jianxin Jeff Yan487663.76
Xinyi Huang52245129.63