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July 7, 2015

Google Study: Most Security Questions Easy To Hack [+ security insight about Google]

Filed under: Cybersecurity,Security — Patrick Durusau @ 3:58 pm

Google Study: Most Security Questions Easy To Hack by Shirley Siluk.

From the post:

There’s a big problem with the security questions often used to help people log into Web sites, or remember or access lost passwords — questions with answers that are easy to remember are also easy for hackers to guess. That’s the key finding of a study that Google recently presented at the International World Wide Web Conference in Florence, Italy.

Google said it analyzed hundreds of millions of secret questions and answers that users had employed to recover access to their accounts. It then calculated how easily hackers could guess the answers to those questions.

In many cases, the answers were relatively easy to hit upon because of unique cultural factors, according to the study. For English speakers, for example, hackers had a 19.7 percent chance of guessing — in just one guess — the right answer to the question, “What is your favorite food?” (Answer: pizza.)

‘Neither Secure nor Reliable’

Google undertook the study because, “despite the prevalence of security questions, their safety and effectiveness have rarely been studied in depth,” noted Anti-Abuse Research Lead Elie Bursztein and Software Engineer Ilan Caron. The conclusion reached after looking at all those millions of questions and answers? “(S)ecret questions are neither secure nor reliable enough to be used as a standalone account recovery mechanism,” Bursztein and Caron said Thursday in a post on Google’s Online Security Blog.

Shirley goes on to give examples of how the answers to some security questions are culturally determined but also quotes suggestions for making your answers to secret questions more secure.

What is the one insight into Google security can you draw from this article?

Google stored the answers to secret questions as clear text.

Yes?

Otherwise, how did they develop the statistics about secret answer usage?

Another answer isn’t clear from: Secrets, Lies, and Account Recovery: Lessons from the Use of Personal Knowledge Questions at Google by Joseph Bonneau, Elie Bursztein, Ilan Caron, Rob Jackson, and Mike Williamson.

Abstract:

We examine the first large real-world data set on personal knowledge question’s security and memorability from their deployment at Google. Our analysis confirms that secret questions generally offer a security level that is far lower than user-chosen passwords. It turns out to be even lower than proxies such as the real distribution of surnames in the population would indicate. Surprisingly, we found that a significant cause of this insecurity is that users often don’t answer truthfully. A user survey we conducted revealed that a significant fraction of users (37%) who admitted to providing fake answers did so in an attempt to make them “harder to guess” although on aggregate this behavior had the opposite effect as people “harden” their answers in a predictable way.

On the usability side, we show that secret answers have surprisingly poor memorability despite the assumption that reliability motivates their continued deployment. From millions of account recovery attempts we observed a significant fraction of users (e.g 40% of our English-speaking US users) were unable to recall their answers when needed. This is lower than the success rate of alternative recovery mechanisms such as SMS reset codes (over 80%).

Comparing question strength and memorability reveals that the questions that are potentially the most secure (e.g what is your first phone number) are also the ones with the worst memorability. We conclude that it appears next to impossible to find secret questions that are both secure and memorable. Secret questions continue have some use when combined with other signals, but they should not be used alone and best practice should favor more reliable alternatives.

Google has moved on to more secure methods for account recovery but the existence of the secret answer data, even from 2013, remains a danger for some users on the Internet.

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