Ke Coby Wang (UNC Chapel Hill), Michael K. Reiter (UNC Chapel Hill)

We present a framework by which websites can coordinate to make it difficult for users to set similar passwords at these websites, in an effort to break the culture of password reuse on the web today.
Though the design of such a framework is fraught with risks to users’ security and privacy, we show that these risks can be effectively mitigated through careful scoping of the goals for such a framework and through principled design. At the core of our framework is a private set-membership-test protocol that enables one website to determine, upon a user setting a password for use at it, whether that user has already set a similar password at another participating website, but with neither side disclosing to the other the password(s) it employs in the protocol. Our framework then layers over this protocol a collection of techniques to mitigate the leakage necessitated by such a test. We verify via probabilistic model checking that these techniques are effective in maintaining account security, and since these mechanisms are consistent with common user experience today, our framework should be unobtrusive to users who do not reuse similar passwords across websites (e.g., due to having adopted a password manager). Through a working implementation of our framework and optimization of its parameters based on insights of how passwords tend to be reused, we show that our design can meet the scalability challenges facing such a service.

View More Papers

TIMBER-V: Tag-Isolated Memory Bringing Fine-grained Enclaves to RISC-V

Samuel Weiser (Graz University of Technology), Mario Werner (Graz University of Technology), Ferdinand Brasser (Technische Universität Darmstadt), Maja Malenko (Graz University of Technology), Stefan Mangard (Graz University of Technology), Ahmad-Reza Sadeghi (Technische Universität Darmstadt)

Read More

Cracking the Wall of Confinement: Understanding and Analyzing Malicious...

Eihal Alowaisheq (Indiana University, King Saud University), Peng Wang (Indiana University), Sumayah Alrwais (King Saud University), Xiaojing Liao (Indiana University), XiaoFeng Wang (Indiana University), Tasneem Alowaisheq (Indiana University, King Saud University), Xianghang Mi (Indiana University), Siyuan Tang (Indiana University), Baojun Liu (Tsinghua University)

Read More

Robust Performance Metrics for Authentication Systems

Shridatt Sugrim (Rutgers University), Can Liu (Rutgers University), Meghan McLean (Rutgers University), Janne Lindqvist (Rutgers University)

Read More

A Systematic Framework to Generate Invariants for Anomaly Detection...

Cheng Feng (Imperial College London & Siemens Corporate Technology), Venkata Reddy Palleti (Singapore University of Technology and Design), Aditya Mathur (Singapore University of Technology and Design), Deeph Chana (Imperial College London)

Read More