Please wait a minute...
Frontiers of Computer Science

ISSN 2095-2228

ISSN 2095-2236(Online)

CN 10-1014/TP

Postal Subscription Code 80-970

2018 Impact Factor: 1.129

Front. Comput. Sci.    2020, Vol. 14 Issue (3) : 143802    https://doi.org/10.1007/s11704-019-7342-y
RESEARCH ARTICLE
Hybritus: a password strength checker by ensemble learning from the query feedbacks of websites
Yongzhong HE, Endalew Elsabeth ALEM, Wei WANG()
Beijing Key Laboratory of Security and Privacy in Intelligent Transportation, Beijing Jiaotong University, Beijing 100044, China
 Download: PDF(590 KB)  
 Export: BibTeX | EndNote | Reference Manager | ProCite | RefWorks
Abstract

Password authentication is vulnerable to dictionary attacks. Password strength measurement helps users to choose hard-to-guess passwords and enhance the security of systems based on password authentication. Although there are many password strength metrics and tools, none of them produces an objective measurement with inconsistent policies and different dictionaries. In this work, we analyzed the password policies and checkers of top 100 popular websites that are selected from Alexa rankings. The checkers are inconsistent and thus they may label the same password as different strength labels, because each checker is sensitive to its configuration, e.g., the algorithm used and the training data. Attackers are empowered to exploit the above vulnerabilities to crack the protected systems more easily. As such, single metrics or local training data are not enough to build a robust and secure password checker. Based on these observations, we proposed Hybritus that integrates different websites’ strategies and views into a global and robust model of the attackers with multiple layer perceptron (MLP) neural networks. Our data set is comprised of more than 3.3 million passwords taken from the leaked, transformed and randomly generated dictionaries. The data set were sent to 10 website checkers to get the feedbacks on the strength of passwords labeled as strong, medium and weak. Then we used the features of passwords generated by term frequency–inverse document frequency to train and test Hybritus. The experimental results show that the accuracy of passwords strength checking can be as high as 97.7% and over 94% even if it was trained with only ten thousand passwords. User study shows that Hybritus is usable as well as secure.

Keywords password      password strength      password checker      neural networks     
Corresponding Author(s): Wei WANG   
Issue Date: 10 January 2020
 Cite this article:   
Yongzhong HE,Endalew Elsabeth ALEM,Wei WANG. Hybritus: a password strength checker by ensemble learning from the query feedbacks of websites[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2020, 14(3): 143802.
 URL:  
https://academic.hep.com.cn/fcs/EN/10.1007/s11704-019-7342-y
https://academic.hep.com.cn/fcs/EN/Y2020/V14/I3/143802
1 L Gorman. Comparing passwords, tokens, and biometrics for user authentication. Proceedings of the IEEE, 2003, 91(12): 2021–2040
2 C Shen, Y Chen, X Guan, R Maxion. Pattern-growth based mining mouse-interaction behavior for an active user authentication system. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2017, DOI:10.1109/TDSC.2017.2771295
3 C Shen, Y Li, Y Chen, X Guan, R Roy. Performance analysis of multimotion sensor behavior for active smartphone authentication. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 2018, 13(1): 48–62
4 C Shen, Y Chen, X Guan. Performance evaluation of implicit smartphones authentication via sensor-behavior analysis. Information Sciences, 2018, (430–431): 538–553
5 C Herley, P Van Oorschot. A research agenda acknowledging the persistence of passwords. IEEE Security & Privacy, 2012, 10(1): 28–36
6 A Das, J Bonneau, M Caesar, N Borisov, X Wang. The tangled web of password reuse. The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, 2014, 14: 23–26
7 WE Burr, D F Dodson, E M Newton, R A Perlner, WT Polk, S Gupta, E A Nabbus. Electronic authentication guideline–special publication. 800-63-Version 1.0.2. Recommendations of the National Institute of Standards of Technology (NIST), 2006
8 S Komanduri, R Shay, P Kelley, M Mazurek, L Bauer, N Christin, L Cranor, S Egelman. Of passwords and people: measuring the effect of password-composition policies. In: Proceedings of the International Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2011, 2595–2604
9 M Weir, S Aggarwal, M Collins, H Stern. Testing metrics for password creation policies by attacking large sets of revealed passwords. In: Proceedings of the 17th ACM Conference on Computer and Communications Security. 2010: 162–175
10 W Ma, J Campbell, D Tran, D Kleeman. Password entropy and password quality. In: Proceedings of the 4th International Conference on Network and System Security. 2010, 583–587
11 X D C De Carnavalet, M Mannan. From very weak to very strong: analyzing password-strength meters. The Network and Distributed System Security Symposium, 2014, 14: 23–26
12 J Bonneau, C Herley, P C Oorschot, Stajano Frank. The quest to replace passwords: a framework for comparative evaluation of Web authentication schemes. In: Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 2010, 553–567
13 P Inglesant, M Sasse. The true cost of unusable password policies: password use in the wild. In: Proceedings of the SIGCHI Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2010, 383–392
14 K Schaffer. Are password requirements too difficult? Computer, 2011, 44(12): 90–92
15 R Shay, P G Kelley, P G Leon, M L Mazurek, N Christin, L F Cranor. Encountering stronger password requirements: user attitudes and behaviors categories and subject descriptors. In: Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security. 2010, 2
16 B Grawemeyer, H Johnson. Using and managing multiple passwords: a week to a view. Interacting with Computers, 2011, 23(3): 256–267
17 M D Amico, P Michiardi, Y Roudier, S Antipolis. Password strength: an empirical analysis. In: Proceedings of the 29th IEEE International Conference on Computer Communications. 2010, 983–991
18 M Jakobsson, M Dhiman. The Benefits of Understanding Passwords. Springer Briefs in Computer Science, Springer, New York, NY, 2013
19 R Veras, J Thorpe, C Collins. Visualizing semantics in passwords: the role of dates. In: Proceedings of the 9th International Symposium on Visualization for Cyber Security. 2012, 88–95
20 D Florêncio, C Herley, P C Van Oorschot. An administrator’s guide to internet password research. In: Proceedings of the 28th Large Installation System Administration Conference. 2014, 44–61
21 T Gautam, A Jain. Analysis of brute force attack using TG – Dataset. In: Proceedings of SAI Intelligent Systems Conference. 2015, 984–988
22 P G Kelley, S Komanduri, M L Mazurek, R Shay, T Vidas, L Bauer, N Chnstin, L F Cranor, J López. Guess again (and again and again): measuring password strength by simulating password-cracking algorithms. In: Proceedings of IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 2012, 523–537
23 Z Li, W Han, W Xu. A large-scale empirical analysis of Chinese Web passwords. In: Proceedings of the 23rd USENIX Security Symposium. 2014, 559–574
24 J Bonneau. The science of guessing: analyzing an anonymized corpus of 70 million passwords. In: Proceedings of the IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 2012, 538–552
25 D Florencio, C Herley.Where do security policies come from? In: Proceedings of the 6th Symposium on Usable Privacy and Security. 2010, 10
26 D Wang, P Wang. The emperor’s new password creation policies. In: Proceedings of European Symposium on Research in Computer Security. 2015
27 W Wang, J Liu, G Pitsilis, X Zhang. Abstracting massive data for lightweight intrusion detection in computer networks. Information Science, 2018, 433: 417–430
28 C Castelluccia, M Dürmuth, D Perito. Adaptive password-strength meters fromMarkov models. In: Proceedings of the 19th Annual Network and Distributed System Security Symposium. 2012
29 M Weir, S Aggarwal, B De Medeiros, B Glodek. Password cracking using probabilistic context-free grammars. In: Proceedings of the 30th IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy. 2009, 391–405
30 D Wang. fuzzyPSM: a new password strength meter using fuzzy probabilistic context-free grammars. In: Proceedings of the 46th Annual IEEE/IFIP International Conference on Dependable Systems and Networks. 2016, 595–606
31 R Shay, L Bauer, N Christin, L F Cranor, A Forget, S Komanduri, M L Mazurek, W Melicher, S M Segreti, B Ur. A spoonful of sugar? The impact of guidance and feedback on password-creation behavior. In: Proceedings of the 33rd ACM Conference on Human Factors in Computing Systems. 2015, 2903–2912
32 J Bonneau, S Preibusch. The password thicket: technical and market failures in human authentication on the Web. In: Proceedings of the Workshop on the Economics of Information Security. 2010
33 W Wang, T Guyet, R Quiniou, M Cordier, F Masseglia, X Zhang. Autonomic intrusion detection: adaptively detecting anomalies over unlabeled audit data streams in computer networks. Knowledge-Based Systems, 2014, 70(11): 103–117
34 W Wang, Y He, J Liu, S Gombault. Constructing important features from massive network traffic for lightweight intrusion detection. IET Information Security, 2015, 9(6): 374–379
35 W Wang, X Guan, X Zhang. Processing of massive audit data streams for real-time anomaly intrusion detection. Computer Communications, 2008, 31(1): 58–72
36 X Wang, W Wang, Y He, J Liu, Z Han, X Zhang. Characterizing android apps’ behavior for effective detection of malapps at large scale. Future Generation Computer Systems, 2017, 75: 30–45
37 W Wang, X Wang, D Feng, J Liu, Z Han, X Zhang. Exploring permission-induced risk in android applications for malicious application detection. IEEE Transactions on Information Forensics and Security, 2014, 9(11): 1869–1882
38 D Su, J Liu, X Wang, X Wang. Detecting android locker-ransomware on Chinese social networks. IEEE Access, 2019, 7: 20381–20393
39 W Wang, Y Li, X Wang, J Liu, X Zhang. Detecting android malicious apps and categorizing benign apps with ensemble of classifiers. Future Generation Computer Systems, 2018, 78: 987–994
40 W Wang, Z Gao, M Zhao, Y Li, J Liu, X Zhang. DroidEnsemble: detecting android malicious applications with ensemble of string and structural static features. IEEE Access, 2018, 6: 31798–31807
41 W Wang, M Zhao, Z Gao, G Xu, Y Li, H Xian, X Zhang. Constructing features for detecting android malicious applications: issues, taxonomy and directions. IEEE Access, 2019, 7: 67602–67631
42 W Wang, M Zhao, J Wang. Effective android malware detection with a hybrid model based on deep autoencoder and convolutional neural network. Journal of Ambient Intelligence and Humanized Computing, 2018, 1–9
43 X Liu, J Liu, S Zhu, W Wang, X Zhang. Privacy risk analysis and mitigation of analytics libraries in the android ecosystem. IEEE Transactions on Mobile Computing. 2019, DOI:10.1109/TMC.2019.2903186
44 C Zhang, C Liu, X Zhang, G Almpanidis. An up-to-date comparison of state-of-the-art classification algorithms. Expert System Applications, 2017, 82: 128–150
45 A Ciaramella, P D Arco, A De Santis, C Galdi, R Tagliaferri. Neural network techniques for proactive password checking. IEEE Transactions on Dependable and Secure Computing, 2006, 3(4): 327–339
46 F N Sibai, A Shehhi, S Shehhi, B Shehhi, N Salami. Secure password detection with artificial neural networks. In: Proceedings of International Conference on Innovations in Information Technology. 2008, 628–632
47 R Shay, S Komanduri, A L Durity, P Huh, M L Mazurek, S M Segreti, B Ur, L Bauer, N Christin, L F Cranor. Designing password policies for strength and usability. ACM Transactions on Information and System Security, 2016, 18(4): 13
[1] Article highlights Download
[1] Huiying ZHANG, Yu ZHANG, Xin GENG. Practical age estimation using deep label distribution learning[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2021, 15(3): 153318-.
[2] Wangli HAO, Ian Max ANDOLINA, Wei WANG, Zhaoxiang ZHANG. Biologically inspired visual computing: the state of the art[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2021, 15(1): 151304-.
[3] Zhiqian ZHANG, Chenliang LI, Zhiyong WU, Aixin SUN, Dengpan YE, Xiangyang LUO. NEXT: a neural network framework for next POI recommendation[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2020, 14(2): 314-333.
[4] Anna ZHU, Seiichi UCHIDA. Scene word recognition from pieces to whole[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2019, 13(2): 292-301.
[5] Jun ZHANG, Bineng ZHONG, Pengfei WANG, Cheng WANG, Jixiang DU. Robust feature learning for online discriminative tracking without large-scale pre-training[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2018, 12(6): 1160-1172.
[6] Qianjun ZHANG, Lei ZHANG. Convolutional adaptive denoising autoencoders for hierarchical feature extraction[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2018, 12(6): 1140-1148.
[7] Lili HUANG, Jiefeng PENG, Ruimao ZHANG, Guanbin LI, Liang LIN. Learning deep representations for semantic image parsing: a comprehensive overview[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2018, 12(5): 840-857.
[8] Lip Yee POR, Chin Soon KU, Amanul ISLAM, Tan Fong ANG. Graphical password: prevent shoulder-surfing attack using digraph substitution rules[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2017, 11(6): 1098-1108.
[9] Zhen LI, Yuqing WANG, Tian ZHI, Tianshi CHEN. A survey of neural network accelerators[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2017, 11(5): 746-761.
[10] Jian-Hao LUO,Wang ZHOU,Jianxin WU. Image categorization with resource constraints: introduction, challenges and advances[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2017, 11(1): 13-26.
[11] Feifei ZHANG,Yongbin YU,Qirong MAO,Jianping GOU,Yongzhao ZHAN. Pose-robust feature learning for facial expression recognition[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2016, 10(5): 832-844.
[12] Samir ZEGHLACHE,Djamel SAIGAA,Kamel KARA. Fault tolerant control based on neural network interval type-2 fuzzy sliding mode controller for octorotor UAV[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2016, 10(4): 657-672.
[13] Yi ZHENG,Qi LIU,Enhong CHEN,Yong GE,J. Leon ZHAO. Exploiting multi-channels deep convolutional neural networks for multivariate time series classification[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2016, 10(1): 96-112.
[14] Cong GUO,Zijian ZHANG,Liehuang ZHU,Yu-an TAN,Zhen YANG. Scalable protocol for cross-domain group password-based authenticated key exchange[J]. Front. Comput. Sci., 2015, 9(1): 157-169.
[15] Bo YUAN, Wenhuang LIU. Measure oriented training: a targeted approach to imbalanced classification problems[J]. Front Comput Sci, 2012, 6(5): 489-497.
Viewed
Full text


Abstract

Cited

  Shared   
  Discussed