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Abstract- Passwords are ubiquitous authentication methods and they represent the identity of an individual for a system. Users are consistently told that a strong password is essential these days to protect private data. Despite the existence of more secure methods of authenticating users, including smart cards and biometrics, password authentication continues to be the most common means in use. Thus it is important for organizations to recognize the vulnerabilities to which passwords are subjected, and develop strong policies governing the creation and use of passwords to ensure that those vulnerabilities are not exploited. This work employs machine Learning technique to analyze the strength of the password to facilitate organizations launch a multifaceted defense against password breach and provide a highly secure environment. A supervised learning algorithm namely Support Vector Machine is used for classification of password. The linear and nonlinear SVM classification models are trained using the features extracted from the password dataset. The trained model shows the prediction accuracy of about 98% for 10- fold cross validation.
Index Terms- Password Strength, Machine Learning, Support Vector Machine, Classification, Feature Extraction
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I. INTRODUCTION
Life these days has become largely dependent on passwords. A typical computer user may require passwords for many purposes: logging in to computer accounts, retrieving e-mail from servers, transferring funds, shopping online, accessing programs, databases, networks, web sites, and even reading the morning newspaper online. The problem of selecting and using good passwords is becoming more important every day. The number and the importance of services that are provided through computers and networks increases dramatically and in many cases such services require passwords or other forms of user identification. For different reasons, including obvious security concerns, users have to use different passwords for different systems or services, making it more difficult to remember and protect one's password. Passwords are not only critical for login identification, but also in more sophisticated service-granting systems, such as Kerberos. Finally, passwords are needed for protecting secret information that cannot be remembered by the user (e.g. private keys) in authentication and encryption software that is becoming essential to many applications.
The average user chooses a simple, guessable, memorable password and cares less about choosing a strong password. Nowadays there is a...