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WWW
2005
ACM

A convenient method for securely managing passwords

14 years 4 months ago
A convenient method for securely managing passwords
Computer users are asked to generate, keep secret, and recall an increasing number of passwords for uses including host accounts, email servers, e-commerce sites, and online financial services. Unfortunately, the password entropy that users can comfortably memorize seems insufficient to store unique, secure passwords for all these accounts, and it is likely to remain constant as the number of passwords (and the adversary's computational power) increases into the future. In this paper, we propose a technique that uses a strengthened cryptographic hash function to compute secure passwords for arbitrarily many accounts while requiring the user to memorize only a single short password. This mechanism functions entirely on the client; no server-side changes are needed. Unlike previous approaches, our design is both highly resistant to brute force attacks and nearly stateless, allowing users to retrieve their passwords from any location so long as they can execute our program and remem...
J. Alex Halderman, Brent Waters, Edward W. Felten
Added 22 Nov 2009
Updated 22 Nov 2009
Type Conference
Year 2005
Where WWW
Authors J. Alex Halderman, Brent Waters, Edward W. Felten
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