ProActive Approach for Generating Random Passwords for Information Protection

Abstract

Text based passwords are the most widely used authentication mechanism in multiuser environment. Creating strong password is often a difficult task for users. Multiuser environments employ some password composition policy for users, which require a password containing alphabets (both lowercase and uppercase), numerical digits and special symbols. These policies become obstacle for users in creating good password that satisfies the specific policy. Users favor memorability factor without considering its security against an attacker. Memorability is important because if a user forgets password then usability of the system decreases. This paper presents a ProActive random password generation technique. A random password is generated by inserting random digits and special symbols in a randomly chosen word. Generated password is checked against certain attacker approaches through ProActive analysis. If ProActive analysis results positive then password is discarded and process starts all over again. To help users in memorizing password, both how the password is generated and word used to generate the password is sent.