In today’s digital world, passwords are the keys that unlock our online lives, keeping our social media, financial accounts, and streaming services secure. However, creating strong passwords that are easy to remember is hard. Often an individual’s language and cultural background influence password creation, which an attacker can exploit. This paper examines the importance of the User Context Bias (UCB) on Swedish passwords, versus international passwords stemming from multiple languages and cultures. This is done by employing four different password-cracking tools; Probabilistic Context Free Grammar (PCFG), Ordered Markov Enumerator (OMEN), Odinn, and Hashcat. The findings reveal that all the tools are able to crack a higher percentage of passwords when attacking those created by Swedish natives compared to their international counterparts. PCFG, in particular, is nearly twice as effective as the other tools against Swedish passwords after just 10,000 guesses, while OMEN is the best against Swedish passwords after 5 million guesses.

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Are Swedish Passwords Tougher Than the Rest?

  • Casper Jensen,
  • Martin Karresand,
  • Gurjot Singh Gaba,
  • Andrei Gurtov,
  • Erik Öhrn

摘要

In today’s digital world, passwords are the keys that unlock our online lives, keeping our social media, financial accounts, and streaming services secure. However, creating strong passwords that are easy to remember is hard. Often an individual’s language and cultural background influence password creation, which an attacker can exploit. This paper examines the importance of the User Context Bias (UCB) on Swedish passwords, versus international passwords stemming from multiple languages and cultures. This is done by employing four different password-cracking tools; Probabilistic Context Free Grammar (PCFG), Ordered Markov Enumerator (OMEN), Odinn, and Hashcat. The findings reveal that all the tools are able to crack a higher percentage of passwords when attacking those created by Swedish natives compared to their international counterparts. PCFG, in particular, is nearly twice as effective as the other tools against Swedish passwords after just 10,000 guesses, while OMEN is the best against Swedish passwords after 5 million guesses.