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1. A Measurement Study of Authentication Rate-Limiting Mechanisms of Modern Websites

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3274694.3274714  

   Lu, Bo ; Zhang, Xiaokuan ; Ling, Ziman ; Zhang, Yinqian ; Lin, Zhiqiang ( January 2018 , Proceedings of the 34th Annual Computer Security Applications Conference)

   Text passwords remain a primary means for user authentication on modern computer systems. However, recent studies have shown the promises of guessing user passwords efficiently with auxiliary information of the targeted accounts, such as the users' personal information, previously used passwords, or those used in other systems. Authentication rate-limiting mechanisms, such as account lockout and login throttling, are common methods to defeat online password cracking attacks. But to date, no published studies have investigated how authentication rate-limiting is implemented by popular websites. In this paper, we present a measurement study of such countermeasures against online password cracking. Towards this end, we propose a black-box approach to modeling and validating the websites' implementation of the rate-limiting mechanisms. We applied the tool to examine all 182 websites that we were able to analyze in the Alexa Top 500 websites in the United States. The results are rather surprising: 131 websites (72%) allow frequent, unsuccessful login attempts without account lockout or login throttling (though some of these websites force the adversary to lower the login frequency or constantly change his IP addresses to circumvent the rate-limiting enforcement). The remaining 51 websites are not absolutely secure either: 28 websites may block a legitimate user with correct passwords when the account is locked out, effectively enabling authentication denial-of-service attacks. 

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2. Click This, Not That: Extending Web Authentication with Deception

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3433210.3453088  

   Barron, Timothy ; So, Johnny ; Nikiforakis, Nick ( May 2021 , Proceedings of the 2021 ACM Asia Conference on Computer and Communications Security (ASIACCS))

   null (Ed.)

   With phishing attacks, password breaches, and brute-force login attacks presenting constant threats, it is clear that passwords alone are inadequate for protecting the web applications entrusted with our personal data. Instead, web applications should practice defense in depth and give users multiple ways to secure their accounts. In this paper we propose login rituals, which define actions that a user must take to authenticate, and web tripwires, which define actions that a user must not take to remain authenticated. These actions outline expected behavior of users familiar with their individual setups on applications they use often. We show how we can detect and prevent intrusions from web attackers lacking this familiarity with their victim's behavior. We design a modular and application-agnostic system that incorporates these two mechanisms, allowing us to add an additional layer of deception-based security to existing web applications without modifying the applications themselves. Next to testing our system and evaluating its performance when applied to five popular open-source web applications, we demonstrate the promising nature of these mechanisms through a user study. Specifically, we evaluate the detection rate of tripwires against simulated attackers, 88% of whom clicked on at least one tripwire. We also observe web users' creation of personalized login rituals and evaluate the practicality and memorability of these rituals over time. Out of 39 user-created rituals, all of them are unique and 79% of users were able to reproduce their rituals even a week after creation. 

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3. Continuous Authentication based on Hand Micro-movement during Smartphone Form Filling by Seated Human Subjects [Continuous Authentication based on Hand Micro-movement during Smartphone Form Filling by Seated Human Subjects]

   https://doi.org/10.5220/0010225804240431  

   Ray, Aratrika ; Hou, Daqing ; Schuckers, Stephanie ; Barbir, Abbie ( January 2021 , 7th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy)

   Mobile devices typically rely on entry-point and other one-time authentication mechanisms such as a password, PIN, fingerprint, iris, or face. But these authentication types are prone to a wide attack vector and worse 1 INTRODUCTION Currently smartphones are predominantly protected a patterned password is prone to smudge attacks, and fingerprint scanning is prone to spoof attacks. Other forms of attacks include video capture and shoulder surfing. Given the increasingly important roles smartphones play in e-commerce and other operations where security is crucial, there lies a strong need of continuous authentication mechanisms to complement and enhance one-time authentication such that even if the authentication at the point of login gets compromised, the device is still unobtrusively protected by additional security measures in a continuous fashion. The research community has investigated several continuous authentication mechanisms based on unique human behavioral traits, including typing, swiping, and gait. To this end, we focus on investigating physiological traits. While interacting with hand-held devices, individuals strive to achieve stability and precision. This is because a certain degree of stability is required in order to manipulate and interact successfully with smartphones, while precision is needed for tasks such as touching or tapping a small target on the touch screen (Sitov´a et al., 2015). As a result, to achieve stability and precision, individuals tend to develop their own postural preferences, such as holding a phone with one or both hands, supporting hands on the sides of upper torso and interacting, keeping the phone on the table and typing with the preferred finger, setting the phone on knees while sitting crosslegged and typing, supporting both elbows on chair handles and typing. On the other hand, physiological traits, such as hand-size, grip strength, muscles, age, 424 Ray, A., Hou, D., Schuckers, S. and Barbir, A. Continuous Authentication based on Hand Micro-movement during Smartphone Form Filling by Seated Human Subjects. DOI: 10.5220/0010225804240431 In Proceedings of the 7th International Conference on Information Systems Security and Privacy (ICISSP 2021), pages 424-431 ISBN: 978-989-758-491-6 Copyrightc 2021 by SCITEPRESS – Science and Technology Publications, Lda. All rights reserved still, once compromised, fail to protect the user’s account and data. In contrast, continuous authentication, based on traits of human behavior, can offer additional security measures in the device to authenticate against unauthorized users, even after the entry-point and one-time authentication has been compromised. To this end, we have collected a new data-set of multiple behavioral biometric modalities (49 users) when a user fills out an account recovery form in sitting using an Android app. These include motion events (acceleration and angular velocity), touch and swipe events, keystrokes, and pattern tracing. In this paper, we focus on authentication based on motion events by evaluating a set of score level fusion techniques to authenticate users based on the acceleration and angular velocity data. The best EERs of 2.4% and 6.9% for intra- and inter-session respectively, are achieved by fusing acceleration and angular velocity using Nandakumar et al.’s likelihood ratio (LR) based score fusion. 

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4. Two-factor Password-authenticated Key Exchange with End-to-end Security

   https://doi.org/10.1145/3446807  

   Jarecki, Stanislaw ; Jubur, Mohammed ; Krawczyk, Hugo ; Saxena, Nitesh ; Shirvanian, Maliheh ( August 2021 , ACM Transactions on Privacy and Security)

   null (Ed.)

   We present a secure two-factor authentication (TFA) scheme based on the user’s possession of a password and a crypto-capable device. Security is “end-to-end” in the sense that the attacker can attack all parts of the system, including all communication links and any subset of parties (servers, devices, client terminals), can learn users’ passwords, and perform active and passive attacks, online and offline. In all cases the scheme provides the highest attainable security bounds given the set of compromised components. Our solution builds a TFA scheme using any Device-enhanced Password-authenticated Key Exchange (PAKE), defined by Jarecki et al., and any Short Authenticated String (SAS) Message Authentication, defined by Vaudenay. We show an efficient instantiation of this modular construction, which utilizes any password-based client-server authentication method, with or without reliance on public-key infrastructure. The security of the proposed scheme is proven in a formal model that we formulate as an extension of the traditional PAKE model. We also report on a prototype implementation of our schemes, including TLS-based and PKI-free variants, as well as several instantiations of the SAS mechanism, all demonstrating the practicality of our approach. Finally, we present a usability study evaluating the viability of our protocol contrasted with the traditional PIN-based TFA approach in terms of efficiency, potential for errors, user experience, and security perception of the underlying manual process. 1 

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5. Just In Time Hashing

   https://doi.org/10.1109/EuroSP.2018.00033  

   Harsha, Benjamin ; Blocki, Jeremiah ( April 2018 , 2018 IEEE European Symposium on Security and Privacy (EuroS&P))

   In the past few years billions of user passwords have been exposed to the threat of offline cracking attempts. Such brute-force cracking attempts are increasingly dangerous as password cracking hardware continues to improve and as users continue to select low entropy passwords. Key-stretching techniques such as hash iteration and memory hard functions can help to mitigate the risk, but increased key-stretching effort necessarily increases authentication delay so this defense is fundamentally constrained by usability concerns. We introduce Just in Time Hashing (JIT), a client side key-stretching algorithm to protect user passwords against offline brute-force cracking attempts without increasing delay for the user. The basic idea is to exploit idle time while the user is typing in their password to perform extra key-stretching. As soon as the user types in the first character(s) of their password our algorithm immediately begins filling memory with hash values derived from the character(s) that the user has typed thus far. We conduct a user study to guide the development of JIT e.g. by determining how much extra key-stretching could be performed during idle cycles or how many consecutive deletions JIT may need to handle. Our security analysis demonstrates that JIT can substantially increase guessing costs over traditional key-stretching algorithms with equivalent (or less) authentication delay. Specifically an empirical evaluation using existing password datasets demonstrates that JIT increases guessing costs by nearly an order of magnitude in comparison to standard key-stretching techniques with comparable delay. We provide a proof-of-concept implementation of a Just in Time Hashing algorithm by modifying Argon2. 

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