A Novel Password Policy Focusing on Altering User Password Selection Habits: A Statistical Analysis on Breached Data

Abstract

Online services generally employ password-based systems to enable users to access personal/private content. These services also force their users to change their passwords periodically under specific policies to increase security. However, analysis of breached data reveals that current policies do not consider user password selection habits and pose critical security and privacy concerns. Additionally, when passwords are leaked, attackers have the opportunity to study - and possibly identify - the structure or pattern of the user password selection set. This way, attackers could predict the next password or reduce the search space considerably in their attacks. Therefore, this study proposes a novel behavior-based password policy to increase the present security level and avoid further exploitations if a breach occurs. This study uses statistical methods and visualization techniques to examine the password selection behaviors of over ten million UserID-password pairs collected from anonymously shared data breaches. The data set is anonymized while keeping the uniqueness of userID-password pairs and shared with other researchers along with extracted features. Results show that user password selection patterns can be generalized and used to increase the success rate of attacks. (C) 2021 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.