Password guessing time based on guessing entropy and long-tailed password distribution in the large-scale password dataset

摘要

Currently the password security is serious, but there is not an appropriate metric for measuring passwords. Thus, the main purpose of this paper is to provide a security time period for the user's password in an online system, allowing the user to modify the password before the security period arrives to prevent the attacker from guessing correctly. We use the guessing chain to calculate the expected time that the attacker need to guess the target password correctly based on the guessing entropy. We assume that the attacker uses a dictionary attack, which is also a probability sequence, and the dictionary is non-ordered or ordered. At the same time, we analyze the large-scale password dataset Rockyou, which contains nearly 32 million passwords. And we assume that the ordered dictionary is organized in descending frequency, in which the probability of the occurrence of the password obeys a long-tailed distribution. We explore the form of the distribution function. And we first find that the simple Zipf distribution can better fit with the empirical distribution of ordered dictionary.