A password algorithm recognition and classification framework based on BiGRU attention network
摘要
Accurately classifying password origins is significant for cybersecurity applications such as password strength estimation, attack detection, and forensic investigations. The present work proposes a hybrid ResCNN-BiGRU-Gated Attentive Pooling (GAP) model that leverages character-level embeddings to detect both local and sequential patterns in passwords. The dataset includes a balanced mix of real and synthetically generated passwords, encompassing human-generated, rule-based, Markov, and keyboard walk-based types. The proposed framework integrates Residual-CNN blocks for extracting multi-scale local features, BiGRU layers for modeling long-range sequential relationships, and GAP for emphasizing discriminative features while reducing noise. Hyperparameters were optimized using the Augmented Weighted K-means Grey Wolf Optimizer (AWK-GWO), ensuring maximized accuracy and generalization. Comparative experiments with baseline models demonstrate the effectiveness of the proposed approach, achieving a testing accuracy of 0.9521, F1-macro of 0.952, ROC-AUC of 0.9959, MCC of 0.9401, and Log-Loss of 0.1329. Confusion matrices, ROC curves, and training plots indicate consistent class separation, stable convergence, and well-calibrated probabilities. The combination of convolution, recurrence, and attention mechanisms enables the model to capture intricate patterns in password generation more effectively than individual architectures. This framework offers a robust tool for identifying password origins, supporting cybersecurity forensics, attack mitigation, and security surveillance.