Towards Improving Storage Cost and Security Features of Honeyword Based Approaches

Abstract

Password based authentication shows its vulnerability against inversion attack model in which adversary obtains plaintext password from its corresponding hashed value. To cope up with such attack, honeyword based authentication technique is introduced. In this technique, along with the original password of user, some dummy passwords or honeywords are also stored. Although this technique is good enough to address the aforementioned security breach, but use of additional storage to store the honeywords is still an overhead associated with such approach. In this paper, we have proposed few directions to minimize the storage cost of some of the existing honeyword generation approaches. We have even found that in some cases no additional storage overhead is required. A comparative analysis at the end also shows that the proposed techniques are able to raise some of the security features compared to existing honeyword generation approaches.