DAHash: distribution aware tuning of password hashing costs

DOI10.1007/978-3-662-64331-0_20MaRDI QIDQ2147252zbMATHOpenAlexFDO

Authors Jeremiah Blocki, Wen-Jie Bai

Publication date 22 June 2022

Full work available at URL https://arxiv.org/abs/2101.10374

zbMATH Keywords

Stackelberg gamepassword hashingDAHash

Mathematics Subject Classification ID

Data encryption (aspects in computer science) (68P25) Cryptography (94A60) Authentication, digital signatures and secret sharing (94A62)

Abstract: An attacker who breaks into an authentication server and steals all of the cryptographic password hashes is able to mount an offline-brute force attack against each user's password. Offline brute-force attacks against passwords are increasingly commonplace and the danger is amplified by the well documented human tendency to select low-entropy password and/or reuse these passwords across multiple accounts. Moderately hard password hashing functions are often deployed to help protect passwords against offline attacks by increasing the attacker's guessing cost. However, there is a limit to how "hard" one can make the password hash function as authentication servers are resource constrained and must avoid introducing substantial authentication delay. Observing that there is a wide gap in the strength of passwords selected by different users we introduce DAHash (Distribution Aware Password Hashing) a novel mechanism which reduces the number of passwords that an attacker will crack. Our key insight ishat a resource-constrained authentication server can dynamically tune the hardness parameters of a password hash function based on the (estimated) strength of the user's password. We introduce a Stackelberg game to model the interaction between a defender (authentication server) and an offline attacker. Our model allows the defender to optimize the parameters of DAHash e.g., specify how much effort is spent to hash weak/moderate/high strength passwords. We use several large scale password frequency datasets to empirically evaluate the effectiveness of our differentiated cost password hashing mechanism. We find that the defender who uses our mechanism can reduce the fraction of passwords that would be cracked by a rational offline attacker by around 15%.

Recommendations

• Cost-asymmetric memory hard password hashing
• Balloon hashing: a memory-hard function providing provable protection against sequential attacks
• The password game: negative externalities from weak password practices
• Password hashing and preprocessing
• Memory-demanding password scrambling

Cites work

• scientific article; zbMATH DE number 7005721 (Why is no real title available?)
• Advances in Cryptology - CRYPTO 2003
• Derivative-free optimization: a review of algorithms and comparison of software implementations
• Fixing cracks in the concrete: random oracles with auxiliary input, revisited
• The full cost of cryptanalytic attacks

Cited in

(9)

• The password game: negative externalities from weak password practices
• Half a century of practice: who Is still storing plaintext passwords?
• Study on massive-scale slow-hash recovery using unified probabilistic context-free grammar and symmetrical collaborative prioritization with parallel machines
• Cost-asymmetric memory hard password hashing
• Count-Min Sketches for Estimating Password Frequency within Hamming Distance Two
• PassGAN: a deep learning approach for password guessing
• Cost-asymmetric memory hard password hashing
• A new distribution-sensitive secure sketch and popularity-proportional hashing
• Lyra2: Efficient Password Hashing with High Security against Time-Memory Trade-Offs

Describes a project that uses

Uses Software

• MultiMin
• GitHub

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