Password Cracking and Countermeasures in Computer Security: A Survey by Aaron L.-F. Han, Derek F. Wong, and Lidia S. Chao.
Abstract:
With the rapid development of internet technologies, social networks, and other related areas, user authentication becomes more and more important to protect the data of the users. Password authentication is one of the widely used methods to achieve authentication for legal users and defense against intruders. There have been many password cracking methods developed during the past years, and people have been designing the countermeasures against password cracking all the time. However, we find that the survey work on the password cracking research has not been done very much. This paper is mainly to give a brief review of the password cracking methods, import technologies of password cracking, and the countermeasures against password cracking that are usually designed at two stages including the password design stage (e.g. user education, dynamic password, use of tokens, computer generations) and after the design (e.g. reactive password checking, proactive password checking, password encryption, access control). The main objective of this work is offering the abecedarian IT security professionals and the common audiences with some knowledge about the computer security and password cracking, and promoting the development of this area.
As you know from Strong Passwords – Myths of CS?, there are cases where strong passwords are still useful.
This is an overview of the state of password research and so is neither a practical guide nor does it offer new information for password professionals.
You need to look up abecedarian before you try to use it in a conversation. 😉