Statistical Metrics for Individual Password Strength
Conference paper
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.
Keywords
Statistical Metrics Zipf Distribution Strength Estimate Semantic Evaluation Strength Metrics
These keywords were added by machine and not by the authors. This process is experimental and the keywords may be updated as the learning algorithm improves.
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