Ke Coby Wang (Duke University), Michael K. Reiter (Duke University)

Decoy passwords, or "honeywords," planted in a credential database can alert a site to its breach if ever submitted in a login attempt. To be effective, some honeywords must appear at least as likely to be user-chosen passwords as the real ones, and honeywords must be very difficult to guess without having breached the database, to prevent false breach alarms. These goals have proved elusive, however, for heuristic honeyword generation algorithms. In this paper we explore an alternative strategy in which the defender treats honeyword selection as a Bernoulli process in which each possible password (except the user-chosen one) is selected as a honeyword independently with some fixed probability. We show how Bernoulli honeywords can be integrated into two existing system designs for leveraging honeywords: one based on a honeychecker that stores the secret index of the user-chosen password in the list of account passwords, and another that does not leverage secret state at all. We show that Bernoulli honeywords enable analytic derivation of false breach-detection probabilities irrespective of what information the attacker gathers about the sites' users; that their true and false breach-detection probabilities demonstrate compelling efficacy; and that Bernoulli honeywords can even enable performance improvements in modern honeyword system designs.

View More Papers

TALISMAN: Tamper Analysis for Reference Monitors

Frank Capobianco (The Pennsylvania State University), Quan Zhou (The Pennsylvania State University), Aditya Basu (The Pennsylvania State University), Trent Jaeger (The Pennsylvania State University, University of California, Riverside), Danfeng Zhang (The Pennsylvania State University, Duke University)

Read More

PANDORA: Jailbreak GPTs by Retrieval Augmented Generation Poisoning

Gelei Deng, Yi Liu (Nanyang Technological University), Yuekang Li (The University of New South Wales), Wang Kailong(Huazhong University of Science and Technology), Tianwei Zhang, Yang Liu (Nanyang Technological University)

Read More

Free Proxies Unmasked: A Vulnerability and Longitudinal Analysis of...

Naif Mehanna (Univ. Lille / Inria / CNRS), Walter Rudametkin (IRISA / Univ Rennes), Pierre Laperdrix (CNRS, Univ Lille, Inria Lille), and Antoine Vastel (Datadome)

Read More

CamPro: Camera-based Anti-Facial Recognition

Wenjun Zhu (Zhejiang University), Yuan Sun (Zhejiang University), Jiani Liu (Zhejiang University), Yushi Cheng (Zhejiang University), Xiaoyu Ji (Zhejiang University), Wenyuan Xu (Zhejiang University)

Read More