Slashdot Mirror
Unbreakable Crypto: Store a 30-character Password In Your Subconscious Mind
MrSeb writes "A cross-disciplinary team of US neuroscientists and cryptographers have developed a password/passkey system that removes the weakest link in any security system: the human user. It's ingenious: The system still requires that you enter a password, but at no point do you actually remember the password, meaning it can't be written down and it can't be obtained via coercion or torture — i.e. rubber-hose cryptanalysis. The system, devised by Hristo Bojinov of Stanford University and friends from Northwestern and SRI, relies on implicit learning, a process by which you absorb new information — but you're completely unaware that you've actually learned anything; a bit like learning to ride a bike. The process of learning the password (or cryptographic key) involves the use of a specially crafted computer game that, funnily enough, resembles Guitar Hero. Their experimental results suggest that, after a 45 minute learning session, the 30-letter password is firmly implanted in your subconscious brain. Authentication requires that you play a round of the game — but this time, your 30-letter sequence is interspersed with other random 30-letter sequences. To pass authentication, you must reliably perform better on your sequence. Even after two weeks, it seems you are still able to recall this sequence."
How many standard deviations above 'random guessing' are we talking about? Over how many trials? And 2 weeks is fine, but what about 6 months to a year?
I still prefer 80+ character passphrases lifted from song lyrics whenever possible. If you know the song well enough it's impossible to crack, and the search space is still large among people who know you like that particular song
Replace 'character' with 'note' and it's clear subjects were tortured with Philip Glass for 80 hours and won't soon forget.
When the foot seeks the place of the head, the line is crossed. Know your place. Keep your place. Be a shoe.
State Security forces you to play this game?
The "cross-disciplinary team of US neuroscientists" came up with the most original excuse ever for why they were spending all their grant money on games consoles and all their time playing games.
Log in or else!
It sounds like the way this works, the server will need to know what the password is in order to produce the combined sequence. Doesn't that make it weaker than ordinary passwords? And if you repeatedly get the same random sequence, over time you'll learn that as well. OTOH if you get different random sequences, then it would be possible to extract the original sequence. Did I miss something here?
Do you care about the security of your wireless mouse?
what prevents the rubber hose cryptanalysts from making you play guitar hero in front of their eyes? nothing.
If the user authenticates by performing some action, they can be coerced into performing that action.
Their experimental results suggest that, after a 45 minute learning session, the 30-letter password is firmly implanted in your subconscious brain. Authentication requires that you play a round of the game
I'm assuming I'll still be automatically logged out after 5 minutes of inactivity, cannot recover but will have to change my password when forgotten and passwords will expire every month?
Also; the research suggests users will have to perform better on the injected "password" sequences than random sequences... how will they deal with top players that get a perfect score every time for the entire sequence?
Slashdot social media options: AIM, ICQ, Yahoo, Jabber and Mobile Text. Why no MySpace?
Up, left, left, left, down, up, down, up, right. Got it.
Task Mangler
up-up-down-down-left-right-left-right-B-A-start
I'd rather have someone respond than be modded up.
Only 38 bits of entropy because there's only 6 choices for each of the 30 characters. Yeah a Tesla GPU can chew through that in a day. I'd post the relevant XKCD comic but I'm pretty sure everyone here knows what it is already.
The system requires that you copy-write a short random message by hand, but at no point do you actually remember the subtleties of your individual writing style, like the ballpoint pressure or distribution of the shape of "o"s, meaning it can't be presented as a plain sequence of letters and it can't be obtained via coercion or torture i.e. rubber-hose cryptanalysis. The system, devised by Anonymous Coward, relies on implicit learning, a process by which you absorb new information, but you're completely unaware that you've actually learned anything; a bit like learning to ride a bike. The process of learning the password (or cryptographic key) does NOT involve anything, as your writing style is likely already precisely and intricately shaped for years.
Without a human specialist, a dedicated OCR software would need to be developed, though...
How does the scheme prevent ``play this game or I'll kill your family''?
Who has 45 min to learn a new password? I can't see a company willing to
pay someone for 0.75hr just to learn a password.
-AI
For me, it is far better to grasp the Universe as it really is than to persist in delusion
it can't be obtained via coercion or torture â" i.e. rubber-hose cryptanalysis
Correct me if I'm wrong, but I fail to see how that could be true. How could you NOT be forced to play the authentication "game" by torture or coercion? wtf?
Passwords are clearly a very bad idea - they just don't work for any number of logical, social and practical reasons. So it's great to see real thought going into alternatives. Although I think the overhead of 45 mins learning and other issues with this are a problem, I think the general premise must have something in it that would work well.
The fact we can recognise that we know something, even if we can't repeat it - e.g. you know if someone sings the wrong lyrics to a song even if you can't remember them yourself - MUST have some solution to this problem embedded in it somewhere...
You just refound how people learn masses of information when they need to.
This requires the password to be stored in clear in the system. I think the brain is more trustworthy than that...
Presumably the stress of duress would ruin your performance.
I've been doing something similar to this for the past 4 years.
I have a password that I can hardly spell (without looking at the keyboard), but I know how to type it fast.
Ditto. My typo's frequently consist of typing completely the wrong word.
We need to recall the password after 1 year or even 2.
Please, go on with the tests!
Sent as ripples into the electromagnetic field. No single photon has been harmed in the process.
I've looked at these guys before, http://www.pinplus.net/content/pin-nutshell Basically you remember a pattern and then to log in you are presented with a large grid of letters/numbers which you then have to type in the letters/numbers corresponding to your pattern. So you never reveal your pattern at any point, keyloggers/screenscrapers never have access to your pattern. Even if someone did get a screengrab, there are multiple instances of each letter/number in the grid, so you can't tell which position in the grid the user was referring to.
They ask you for your cat's name...
How are you supposed to protect a password that you don't even know? It seems to me if someone knew how the system worked, they could trick an unsuspecting user into divulging their password without the users knowledge. This is obfuscation, nothing more.
Wouldn't biometrics already be a better solution if you want an authentication routine that strong? I mean to bypass multiple input biometrics (fingerprint + some other bodily feature) you'd have to kidnap the user. And if you already have the user under your control, you can probably force any strong password out of him.
A few readers have commented that the system will need to know your unhashed password. This is clearly bad, but there are even worse flaws.
A 30-character password sounds awfully strong (60^30 combinations if upper/lower-case chars and numbers are used). However, from the article: "Authentication requires that you play a round of the game — but this time, your 30-letter sequence is interspersed with other random 30-letter sequences". This means that the number of characters is irrelevant, really. What matters is the number of "30-letter sequences", and since you need to play them all, they will need to be limited. How many? 10 would probably too many to play, but will still only be the equivalent of a single-digit password. This system will be trivial to crack with brute-force guesses.
Even worse, repeated "login attempts" will reveal which sequence is the correct one - simply check which sequence repeats between tries.
How does your subconscious know which password to use? How many 30-bit passwords can be "implanted"?
Incidentally, the fact that the password is known is really not an issue, if you consider it simply another factor of security. I wouldn't want to play a damned game every time to log in anyway, but if I only occasionally used an account and this was used to verify the system I was on, that would be fine. Call it the Rumsfeld system: you log in with something you know, and something you don't know you know.
So yeah, how'd you type this in a login prompt?
and I can never remember exactly how many "na-na-na"s go in between the "hey, hey, hey"s and the "good-bye"s.....
(welcome to MY hell, and you're welcome!)
Does this method scale to learning more than one password, or does one have to use the same password everywhere? What about changing one's password?
Regarding coercion, it is often more effective to threaten someone's family than to threaten that someone. This method does not seem to offer protection against this kind of coercion.
I know music games are are now passe, but come on Activision, your going to have to try harder that this to get our money again.
"A 'person' is smart. 'People' are dumb, panicky animals and you know that."
Hence "rubber hose", I guess.
Also FatPhil on SoylentNews, id 863
The summary is very misleading. According to TFA and the original paper, it's just a 30-item sequence of the letters S, D, F, J, K and L.
Also, you can't compare it directly to a password, it's a very different scheme. The 30-item sequence gives you an entropy of only about 37.8 bits according to the paper, which frankly is not very strong at all. Although I admit that I didn't read the whole paper (yet), I can see a some problems with this approach. First, it takes a long time to enter a "password" that has a strength of just about 38 bits. Second, this scheme only works for authentication on a system that knows your secret. You have to store the secret in plain text, which is very bad. More importantly, you therefore cannot use this scheme to derive encryption keys - which is the real problem nowadays. We don't need new methods for authentication, we already have public key authentication which is very secure when done correctly. What we need is a way to derive strong symmetric encryption keys which can then for example be used to encrypt the private key for the public key authentication. Third, I don't see at all how this approach should be resistant to rubber-hose cryptanalysis. You can still force someone to log in. Furthermore, it's silly to assume once rubber-hose cryptanalysis is used, the attacker is not already in possession of your hardware anyway. And since this scheme cannot be used e.g. to derive keys for disk encryption, why would they even need you to log in anyway if they already have your data? Doesn't make much sense to me.
I don't think this approach is of use in practice, but it is interesting research nonetheless.
okay, I know people hate the dream explanations, esp. from men. But I had a dream where I was interviewing with a company [like a hipster startup like facebook sorta] and they used something like a midi sequencer and a keyboard to enter in the password in order to roll to production servers. All they guy needed to do was remember how to play the song... the whole song. He kept headphones and since he was a Senior, sat in the front center of the room like a dj. When the password was correct, the install scripts would start running and lights would blink and stuff, it was a big event (I guess this fantasy company doesn't roll everyday? it was a dream okay)
so, in conclusion, cant a song be a password?
Of course it could, but it would be a PITA to input and rather easy to guess by bystanders from a small sample. It would also be rather easy to set up a dictionary type attack.
Seriously, does nobody play Beatmania/IIDX here?
If I'm not mistaken, the only way the system checks whether you know the password is to ask you to play a pseudo-random "game", which they presume a person trained with the passphrase will play better. ...
And I guess the authors haven't ever got pwned by an expert IIDX player.......
(Just search Youtube for videos. If you think 45 minutes is enough for you to play better than them, you're terribly mistaken...)
Don't quote me on this.
Comment removed based on user account deletion
How many standard deviations above 'random guessing' are we talking about? Over how many trials? And 2 weeks is fine, but what about 6 months to a year?
You're missing the point. They're missing the point. It's easy to make one password secure against guessing it in a million years of trying.
But I don't need to remember one password. I need to remember thirty passwords (for my most important stuff, plus another fifty for sites I visit once or twice), all different, and a large subset of which have to be changed every 60 days. If it takes "a 45 minute learning session" for "the 30-letter password to be firmly implanted in your subconscious brain" this is purely out of the question.
And if the answer is "well, just use the the one password because it's unguessable and you can use it for everything"-- yeah, what could possibly go wrong?
Fail.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
...to make me play that "game" to log in?
This does NOT stop people from beating you with a rubber hose. Instead of "Give me your password!" it would be "Play this game til you get it right!" So what? Face it, there is no good way to have a perfect system that only you can get into when you want but no one else can. If you can get in, then someone else can force you to open it, regardless of how. This has the advantage of making it harder for even you to do it if you don't keep up practicing. Sounds like a silly solution to me.
Everything you know is wrong, Just forget the words and sing along.
Well, then your account is safe, but you get to expereince "or else". The problem with any rubber hose proof system, is getting the people with rubber hoses to agree that there efforts won't work.
Well.. maybe. Or Maybe not. But Definitely not sort of.
Up, Up, Down, Down, Left, Right, Left, Right, B, A. Or even in Mike Tyson's Punch Out. I played this week (the original NES version) and still remembered all of the sequences for the different opponents. maybe i was secretly opening old files. It sure did bring back memories.
$ unzip, strip, touch, finger, grep, mount, fsck, more, yes,fsck,fsck,fsck,umount, sleep
How does the scheme prevent ``play this game or I'll kill your family''?
Well, it's tough to get an algorithm to implement ``play this game or I'll kill your family'' on five million stolen hashes in order to add a few hundred thousand accounts to their zombie network that sends "make your tool enormous" spam.
Nobody bothers cracking passwords one at a time-- it's all about mass production these days.
http://www.geoffreylandis.com
Main chorus of "Through the Fire and the Flames"
http://xkcd.com/851/
Is there a topic for which there *isn't* a XKCD comic?
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
You are right!
That's why we break out the "Sitar" Hero! :p
IOW: Troll fail
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
Your own personal mnemonic the first 3 letters of your favorite color, the first 3 letters of your first pets name, the address number of your first address, you get the idea, and punctuate them with ?, &, @, %, $, (, ), ! in a pre defined order.
Works for me.
I killed da wabbit -Elmer Fudd
after some page had a leak and i need to learn a new password... will i still remember the old and the new password? will i only remember the old password? will i only remember the new password? ...
You are right!
That's why we break out the "Sitar" Hero! :p
IOW: Troll fail
The Sitar is Hindu, idiot - derived from the Vina, instrument of Saraswati.
Just because you can't remember the password it doesn't mean they wont torture you anyway.
If you're worried about being tortured you should buy a gun and be prepared to use it either to shoot your enemy or yourself in the head.
As far as whether or not some password will protect anything, any information which has to be protected like that shouldn't be in the possession of one person. It should be in the possession of a group of people.
That is not true. It has been proven that passphrases can be weaker than passwords, simply because words usually follow each other in an ordered pattern.
You'll be safe from brute force attacks, but not any attack that adds intelligence to the mix. And if the person cracking your password knows it uses music lyrics you love, you'll be even more at risk since it only has to test for the songs you like.
What you just described is NOT safety.
It's better to accept human weakness and not rely on individuals to protect important secrets and instead rely on groups of individuals to protect pieces of secrets. The nuclear codes should never be given to one person, but pieces of it should be given to a group of people so that all of them would have to be tortured in sequence in order to get the code.
There are many flaws in the scheme. If it's in the subconscious mind that doens't mean the enemy wont figure a way to get it out. If it's in the machine the enemy could get it out of that. It doesn't stop or provide a decrease in the incentive of the enemy to torture people, in fact it enhances the torture incentive by tricking people into thinking they can withstand torture and it encourages a reliance on centralized responsibility when in this case it should be decentralized.
What I'm saying is, if there is a password it's better never to let any one person know 100% of it. Let different people know different parts of it and spread them out around the world. Nuclear codes should not be some password that one guy has. It should be a password half a dozen have.
the game creates a random sequence of 30 letters chosen from S, D, F, J, K, and L, with no repeating characters.
I just want to know how they're generating 30 character sequences with no repetitions and only 6 characters.
Use of the words "good", "bad" or "evil" is almost invariably the result of oversimplification.
First, 2 weeks are completely meaningless. Second, anybody able to put you under duress can just as easily have you play this game.
Another worthless publicity stunt by "security researchers" that do not get it.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Um, first of all, that was a pun, so here is your free *whoosh*
Secondly, the Sitar is an *Indian* instrument, not limited to Hindus only, it's popular with classical musicians all over the subcontinent, Muslim included. (yes, there does exist such a thing as a Muslim Musician)
I am an ACCA student. Got a query on Accountancy/Finance? Maybe I can help!
http://djlobsterdust.com/index.php/mashups/maybe-we-found-love-carly-ray-jepsen-vs-rihanna/
Pop music still has its uses.
Black holes are where the Matrix raised SIGFPE
Oh dear, where do I even start?
It's not crypto, it's not unbreakable, and the rest is debatable.
It is certainly an interesting experiment. Utterly impractical in this form, but maybe the start of something. But the /. summary is bollocks.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
Do I have to play a game until I hit a [particular] score?
A computer could break this after 2 viewings, so just having people with a camera near you while you're logging in is a security risk.
Additionally, if given unlimited attempts, a human would naturally get better at the 30 character sequence after a few playthroughs since it would be repeated. Their concience mind might even recognize it as familar even if you didn't.
You're 100% right. What's worse, it does ZERO to protect against the coercion part (rubber hose crypto) - if you can do it subconsciously you will still be able to do it under stress and duress. If you create an access control device that is stress sensitive you end up with the problem that it has to be able to distinguish between you being late for work or having an argument with your wife versus having a gun in your ribs - it's a lot of hype for a new toy, but it's IMHO not at all a solution for all the problems they list.
And I can memorise a long password easily: it's called a pass phrase..
Insert