论文标题
密码强度信号:针对密码破解的违反直觉的防御
Password Strength Signaling: A Counter-Intuitive Defense Against Password Cracking
论文作者
论文摘要
我们将密码强度信息发出作为一种新颖但反直觉的防御机制,以防止密码破裂攻击。最近的违规行为使数十亿个用户密码遇到了离线密码破解攻击的危险威胁。离线攻击者可以通过将其哈希价值与违反身份验证服务器的被盗哈希人进行比较,可以快速检查数百万(或有时甚至数十亿/万亿)密码猜测的密码猜测。攻击者仅受他愿意投资的资源的限制。我们的关键想法是让身份验证服务器存储一个(嘈杂的)信号,以了解每个用户密码的强度,以便找到离线攻击者。令人惊讶的是,我们表明信号的噪声分布通常可以调整,以便有理由(利润最大化)攻击者破解密码更少。信令方案利用了一个事实,即密码破解不是零和游戏,即攻击者的利润由破裂密码的价值给出,减去总猜测成本。因此,定义明确的信号策略将鼓励攻击者通过更少的密码来降低其猜测成本。我们使用进化算法来计算防御者的最佳信号传导方案。作为概念验证,我们评估了几个密码数据集上的机制,并表明它可以将破裂的密码总数减少到捍卫离线攻击(在线)攻击方面的所有用户中最多可将$ 12 \%$ $ $ $(分别$ 5 \%$)减少。
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 cracking attacks. An offline attacker can quickly check millions (or sometimes billions/trillions) of password guesses by comparing their hash value with the stolen hash from a breached authentication server. The attacker is limited only by the resources he is willing to invest. Our key idea is to have the authentication server store a (noisy) signal about the strength of each user password for an offline attacker to find. Surprisingly, we show that the noise distribution for the signal can often be tuned so that a rational (profit-maximizing) attacker will crack fewer passwords. The signaling scheme exploits the fact that password cracking is not a zero-sum game i.e., the attacker's profit is given by the value of the cracked passwords minus the total guessing cost. Thus, a well-defined signaling strategy will encourage the attacker to reduce his guessing costs by cracking fewer passwords. We use an evolutionary algorithm to compute the optimal signaling scheme for the defender. As a proof-of-concept, we evaluate our mechanism on several password datasets and show that it can reduce the total number of cracked passwords by up to $12\%$ (resp. $5\%$) of all users in defending against offline (resp. online) attacks.