A Wikipedia sign in form requesting a and passwordA password, sometimes called a passcode, is a memorized secret used to confirm the identity of a user. Using the terminology of the NIST Digital Identity Guidelines, the secret is memorized by a party called the claimant while the party verifying the identity of the claimant is called the verifier.
When the claimant successfully demonstrates knowledge of the password to the verifier through an established, the verifier is able to infer the claimant’s identity.In general, a password is an arbitrary of including letters, digits, or other symbols. If the permissible characters are constrained to be numeric, the corresponding secret is sometimes called a (PIN).Despite its name, a password need not be an actual word; indeed a non-word (in the dictionary sense) may be harder to guess, which is a desirable property of passwords. A memorized secret consisting of a sequence of words or other text separated by spaces is sometimes called a. A passphrase is similar to a password in usage but the former is generally longer for added security. Contents.HistoryPasswords have been used since ancient times. Sentries would challenge those wishing to enter an area to supply a password or watchword, and would only allow a person or group to pass if they knew the password.
Further information:Most organizations specify a that sets requirements for the composition and usage of passwords, typically dictating minimum length, required categories (e.g., upper and lower case, numbers, and special characters), prohibited elements (e.g., use of one's own name, date of birth, address, telephone number). Some governments have national authentication frameworks that define requirements for user authentication to government services, including requirements for passwords.Many websites enforce standard rules such as minimum and maximum length, but also frequently include composition rules such as featuring at least one capital letter and at least one number/symbol.
These latter, more specific rules were largely based on a 2003 report by the (NIST), authored by Bill Burr. It originally proposed the practice of using numbers, obscure characters and capital letters and updating regularly. In a 2017 article, Burr reported he regrets these proposals and made a mistake when he recommended them.According to a 2017 rewrite of this NIST report, many websites have rules that actually have the opposite effect on the security of their users. This includes complex composition rules as well as forced password changes after certain periods of time.
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While these rules have long been widespread, they have also long been seen as annoying and ineffective by both users and cyber-security experts. The NIST recommends people use longer phrases as passwords (and advises websites to raise the maximum password length) instead of hard-to-remember passwords with 'illusory complexity' such as 'pA55w+rd'. A user prevented from using the password 'password' may simply choose 'Password1' if required to include a number and uppercase letter. Combined with forced periodic password changes, this can lead to passwords that are difficult to remember but easy to crack.Paul Grassi, one of the 2017 NIST report's authors, further elaborated: 'Everyone knows that an exclamation point is a 1, or an I, or the last character of a password. $ is an S or a 5. If we use these well-known tricks, we aren’t fooling any adversary.
We are simply fooling the database that stores passwords into thinking the user did something good.' Password cracking.
Main article:Attempting to crack passwords by trying as many possibilities as time and money permit is a. A related method, rather more efficient in most cases, is a. In a dictionary attack, all words in one or more dictionaries are tested. Lists of common passwords are also typically tested.is the likelihood that a password cannot be guessed or discovered, and varies with the attack algorithm used.
Cryptologists and computer scientists often refer to the strength or 'hardness' in terms of.Passwords easily discovered are termed weak or vulnerable; passwords very difficult or impossible to discover are considered strong. There are several programs available for password attack (or even auditing and recovery by systems personnel) such as, and; some of which use password design vulnerabilities (as found in the Microsoft LANManager system) to increase efficiency. These programs are sometimes used by system administrators to detect weak passwords proposed by users.Studies of production computer systems have consistently shown that a large fraction of all user-chosen passwords are readily guessed automatically. For example, Columbia University found 22% of user passwords could be recovered with little effort. According to, examining data from a 2006 attack, 55% of passwords would be crackable in 8 hours using a commercially available Password Recovery Toolkit capable of testing 200,000 passwords per second in 2006. He also reported that the single most common password was password1, confirming yet again the general lack of informed care in choosing passwords among users. (He nevertheless maintained, based on these data, that the general quality of passwords has improved over the years—for example, average length was up to eight characters from under seven in previous surveys, and less than 4% were dictionary words.
)Incidents. On July 16, 1998, reported an incident where an attacker had found 186,126 encrypted passwords. At the time the attacker was discovered, 47,642 passwords had already been cracked. In September, 2001, after the deaths of 960 New York employees in the, financial services firm through broke the passwords of deceased employees to gain access to files needed for servicing client accounts.
Technicians used brute-force attacks, and interviewers contacted families to gather personalized information that might reduce the search time for weaker passwords. In December 2009, a major password breach of the website occurred that led to the release of 32 million passwords. The hacker then leaked the full list of the 32 million passwords (with no other identifiable information) to the Internet. Passwords were stored in cleartext in the database and were extracted through a SQL injection vulnerability. The Application Defense Center (ADC) did an analysis on the strength of the passwords.
In June, 2011, (North Atlantic Treaty Organization) experienced a security breach that led to the public release of first and last names, usernames, and passwords for more than 11,000 registered users of their e-bookshop. The data was leaked as part of, a movement that includes, as well as other hacking groups and individuals.
The aim of AntiSec is to expose personal, sensitive, and restricted information to the world, using any means necessary. On July 11, 2011, a consulting firm that does work for, had their servers hacked by and leaked the same day. 'The leak, dubbed 'Military Meltdown Monday,' includes 90,000 logins of military personnel—including personnel from, the, various facilities, staff, and what looks like private sector contractors.' These leaked passwords wound up being hashed in SHA1, and were later decrypted and analyzed by the ADC team at, revealing that even military personnel look for shortcuts and ways around the password requirements.Alternatives to passwords for authenticationThe numerous ways in which permanent or semi-permanent passwords can be compromised has prompted the development of other techniques. Unfortunately, some are inadequate in practice, and in any case few have become universally available for users seeking a more secure alternative. A 2012 paper examines why passwords have proved so hard to supplant (despite numerous predictions that they would soon be a thing of the past ); in examining thirty representative proposed replacements with respect to security, usability and deployability they conclude 'none even retains the full set of benefits that legacy passwords already provide.' Having passwords which are only valid once makes many potential attacks ineffective.
Most users find single use passwords extremely inconvenient. They have, however, been widely implemented in personal, where they are known as (TANs). As most home users only perform a small number of transactions each week, the single use issue has not led to intolerable customer dissatisfaction in this case. are similar in some ways to single-use passwords, but the value to be entered is displayed on a small (generally pocketable) item and changes every minute or so. one-time passwords are used as single-use passwords, but the dynamic characters to be entered are visible only when a user superimposes a unique printed visual key over a server generated challenge image shown on the user's screen. Access controls based on e.g.
The necessary keys are usually too large to memorize (but see proposal Passmaze) and must be stored on a local computer, or portable memory device, such as a or even. The private key may be stored on a cloud service provider, and activated by the use of a password or two factor authentication. methods promise authentication based on unalterable personal characteristics, but currently (2008) have high error rates and require additional hardware to scan, for example, etc. They have proven easy to spoof in some famous incidents testing commercially available systems, for example, the gummie fingerprint spoof demonstration, and, because these characteristics are unalterable, they cannot be changed if compromised; this is a highly important consideration in access control as a compromised access token is necessarily insecure.
technology is claimed to eliminate the need for having multiple passwords. Such schemes do not relieve user and administrators from choosing reasonable single passwords, nor system designers or administrators from ensuring that private access control information passed among systems enabling single sign-on is secure against attack. As yet, no satisfactory standard has been developed. Envaulting technology is a password-free way to secure data on removable storage devices such as USB flash drives. Instead of user passwords, access control is based on the user's access to a network resource.
Non-text-based passwords, such as graphical passwords or mouse-movement based passwords. Graphical passwords are an alternative means of for log-in intended to be used in place of conventional password; they use, or instead of,. One system requires users to select a series of as a password, utilizing the 's ability to easily.
In some implementations the user is required to pick from a series of images in the correct sequence in order to gain access. Another graphical password solution creates a using a randomly generated grid of images.
Each time the user is required to authenticate, they look for the images that fit their pre-chosen categories and enter the randomly generated alphanumeric character that appears in the image to form the one-time password. So far, graphical passwords are promising, but are not widely used. Studies on this subject have been made to determine its usability in the real world. While some believe that graphical passwords would be harder to, others suggest that people will be just as likely to pick common images or sequences as they are to pick common passwords.
(2-Dimensional Key) is a 2D matrix-like key input method having the key styles of multiline passphrase, crossword, ASCII/Unicode art, with optional textual semantic noises, to create big password/key beyond 128 bits to realize the MePKC (Memorizable Public-Key Cryptography) using fully memorizable private key upon the current private key management technologies like encrypted private key, split private key, and roaming private key. use question and answer cue/response pairs to verify identity.' The Password is dead'That 'the password is dead' is a recurring idea in.
It often accompanies arguments that the replacement of passwords by a more secure means of authentication is both necessary and imminent. This claim has been made by numerous people at least since 2004. Notably, speaking at the 2004 predicted the demise of passwords saying 'they just don't meet the challenge for anything you really want to secure.' In 2011 predicted that, within five years, 'You will never need a password again.'
Matt Honan, a journalist at, who was the victim of a hacking incident, in 2012 wrote 'The age of the password has come to an end.' Heather Adkins, manager of Information Security at, in 2013 said that 'passwords are done at Google.' Eric Grosse, VP of security engineering at Google, states that 'passwords and simple bearer tokens, such as cookies, are no longer sufficient to keep users safe.' Christopher Mims, writing in the said the password 'is finally dying' and predicted their replacement by device-based authentication.Avivah Litan of said in 2014 'Passwords were dead a few years ago. Now they are more than dead.' The reasons given often include reference to the as well as security problems of passwords.The claim that 'the password is dead' is often used by advocates of alternatives to passwords, such as,. Many initiatives have been launched with the explicit goal of eliminating passwords.
These include 's, the, the, the and various Identity 2.0 proposals. Jeremy Grant, head of NSTIC initiative (the US Dept. Of Commerce National Strategy for Trusted Identities in Cyberspace), declared 'Passwords are a disaster from a security perspective, we want to shoot them dead.' The FIDO Alliance promises a 'passwordless experience' in its 2015 specification document.In spite of these predictions and efforts to replace them passwords still appear as the dominant form of authentication on the web. In 'The Persistence of Passwords,' Cormac Herley and Paul van Oorschot suggest that every effort should be made to end the 'spectacularly incorrect assumption' that passwords are dead.They argue that 'no other single technology matches their combination of cost, immediacy and convenience' and that 'passwords are themselves the best fit for many of the scenarios in which they are currently used.'
Following the work of Herley and van Oorschot, Bonneau et al. Systematically compared web passwords to 35 competing authentication schemes in terms of their usability, deployability, and security. (The technical report is an extended version of the peer-reviewed paper by the same name.) Their analysis shows that most schemes do better than passwords on security, some schemes do better and some worse with respect to usability, while every scheme does worse than passwords on deployability. The authors conclude with the following observation: “Marginal gains are often not sufficient to reach the activation energy necessary to overcome significant transition costs, which may provide the best explanation of why we are likely to live considerably longer before seeing the funeral procession for passwords arrive at the cemetery.”Website password systems. This section does not any.
Unsourced material may be challenged. ( June 2018) Passwords are used on websites to authenticate users and are usually maintained on the Web server, meaning the browser on a remote system sends a password to the server (by HTTP POST), the server checks the password and sends back the relevant content (or an access denied message). This process eliminates the possibility of local reverse engineering as the code used to authenticate the password does not reside on the local machine.Transmission of the password, via the browser, in plaintext means it can be intercepted along its journey to the server.
Many web authentication systems use SSL to establish an encrypted session between the browser and the server, and is usually the underlying meaning of claims to have a 'secure Web site'. This is done automatically by the browser and increases integrity of the session, assuming neither end has been compromised and that the implementations used are high quality ones.See also. Retrieved 17 May 2019. Computer Security Resource Center (NIST). Retrieved 17 May 2019. Grassi, Paul A.; Garcia, Michael E.; Fenton, James L. (June 2017).
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