"Give me letters 2, 3 and 6!": partial password implementations and attacks

D. Aspinall, M. Just

    Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contribution

    7 Citations (Scopus)

    Abstract

    A partial password is a query of a subset of characters from a full password, posed as a challenge such as “Give me letters 2, 3 and 6 from your password”. Partial passwords are commonly used in the consumer financial sector, both online and in telephone banking. They provide a cheap way of providing a varying challenge that prevents eavesdroppers or intermediate systems learning a shared secret in a single step. Yet, despite widespread adoption among millions of consumers, this mechanism has had little attention in the academic literature. Answers to obvious questions are not clear, for example, how many observations are needed for an attacker to learn the complete password, or to successfully answer the next challenge? In this paper we survey a number of online banking implementations of partial passwords, and investigate the security of the mechanism. In particular, we look at guessing attacks with a projection dictionary ranked by likelihood, and recording attacks which use previous information collected by an attacker. The combination of these techniques yields the best attack on partial passwords.
    Original languageEnglish
    Title of host publicationFinancial Cryptography and Data Security, 17th International Conference, FC 2013, Revised Selected Papers
    Place of PublicationBerlin Heidelberg
    PublisherSpringer Nature
    Pages126-143
    Number of pages18
    Volume7859
    ISBN (Electronic)978-3-642-39884-1
    ISBN (Print)978-3-642-39883-4
    DOIs
    Publication statusPublished - Apr 2013
    EventInternational Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security - Okinawa, Japan
    Duration: 1 Apr 20135 Apr 2013

    Publication series

    NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (LNCS)
    PublisherSpringer
    Volume7859
    ISSN (Print)0302-9743
    ISSN (Electronic)0302-9743

    Conference

    ConferenceInternational Conference on Financial Cryptography and Data Security
    Abbreviated titleFC 2013
    Country/TerritoryJapan
    CityOkinawa
    Period1/04/135/04/13

    Keywords

    • passwords
    • PINs
    • dictionary attack
    • recording attack
    • bank security

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