Abstract
We propose several possible metrics for measuring the strength of an individual password or any other secret drawn from a known, skewed distribution. In contrast to previous ad hoc approaches which rely on textual properties of passwords, we consider the problem without any knowledge of password structure. This enables rating the strength of a password given a large sample distribution without assuming anything about password semantics. We compare the results of our generic metrics against those of the NIST metrics and other previous “entropy-based” metrics for a large password dataset, which suggest over-fitting in previous metrics.
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Bonneau, J. (2012). Statistical Metrics for Individual Password Strength. In: Christianson, B., Malcolm, J., Stajano, F., Anderson, J. (eds) Security Protocols XX. Security Protocols 2012. Lecture Notes in Computer Science, vol 7622. Springer, Berlin, Heidelberg. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35694-0_10
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-642-35694-0_10
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