The Password That Never Was

Dec 9, 2013 11AM
I attended the talk from Dr. Ari Juels, in which he described the threatens to the most common defense of passwords, hashing. Although hashing is supposed to be very hard for attacks, there are password cracking tools that can easily defeat hashing. He introduced a new defense called honeywords, which are decoys designed to be indistinguishable from legitimate passwords, and a related idea, called honey encryption, which creates ciphertexts that decrypt under incorrect keys to seemingly valid messages.