Pushing on String: Adventures in the 'Don't Care' Regions of Password Strength

Presented at BSidesLV 2015, Aug. 4, 2015, 2 p.m. (55 minutes).

The gap between the effort needed to withstand online and offline password guessing attacks is enormous, and there's a large gap where increasing cracking resistance leads to no change in outcomes. On many networks there's also a snowball effect, where an attacker with x% of credentials controls much more than x% of network resources; this also gives a large region where increasing cracking resistance accomplishes nothing. This talk examines the administrator's task of defending a population of users from password cracking, what does and doesn't make sense, and where we are wasting our time (spoiler alert: almost everywhere.)


Presenters:

  • Cormac Herley - Principal Researcher - Microsoft
    Cormac is a Principal Researcher at Microsoft Research, where he has been since 1999. He has published widely in information theory,and networking and security. He is an inventor of 70+ US patents, and has shipped technologies used by hundreds of millions of users. He holds a PhD from Columbia University, an MSEE from Georgia Tech, and a BE from the National University of Ireland.

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