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All your browser-saved passwords could belong to us: a security analysis and a cloud-based new design

Published: 18 February 2013 Publication History

Abstract

Web users are confronted with the daunting challenges of creating, remembering, and using more and more strong passwords than ever before in order to protect their valuable assets on different websites. Password manager is one of the most popular approaches designed to address these challenges by saving users' passwords and later automatically filling the login forms on behalf of users. Fortunately, all the five most popular Web browsers have provided password managers as a useful built-in feature. Unfortunately, the designs of all those Browser-based Password Managers (BPMs) have severe security vulnerabilities. In this paper, we uncover the vulnerabilities of existing BPMs and analyze how they can be exploited by attackers to crack users' saved passwords. Moreover, we propose a novel Cloud-based Storage-Free BPM (CSF-BPM) design to achieve a high level of security with the desired confidentiality, integrity, and availability properties. We have implemented a CSF-BPM system into Firefox and evaluated its correctness and performance. We believe CSF-BPM is a rational design that can also be integrated into other popular Web browsers.

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  • (2024)Password Managers and Vault Application Security and Forensics: Research Challenges and Future OpportunitiesDigital Forensics and Cyber Crime10.1007/978-3-031-56583-0_3(31-53)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2024
  • (2023)"Would you give the same priority to the bank and a game? i do not!"Proceedings of the Nineteenth USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security10.5555/3632186.3632196(171-190)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
  • (2022)Survey and Taxonomy of Adversarial Reconnaissance TechniquesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/353870455:6(1-38)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2022
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Published In

cover image ACM Conferences
CODASPY '13: Proceedings of the third ACM conference on Data and application security and privacy
February 2013
400 pages
ISBN:9781450318907
DOI:10.1145/2435349
  • General Chairs:
  • Elisa Bertino,
  • Ravi Sandhu,
  • Program Chair:
  • Lujo Bauer,
  • Publications Chair:
  • Jaehong Park
Permission to make digital or hard copies of all or part of this work for personal or classroom use is granted without fee provided that copies are not made or distributed for profit or commercial advantage and that copies bear this notice and the full citation on the first page. Copyrights for components of this work owned by others than ACM must be honored. Abstracting with credit is permitted. To copy otherwise, or republish, to post on servers or to redistribute to lists, requires prior specific permission and/or a fee. Request permissions from [email protected]

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Publication History

Published: 18 February 2013

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Author Tags

  1. cloud
  2. password manager
  3. phishing
  4. security
  5. web browser

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CODASPY '13 Paper Acceptance Rate 24 of 107 submissions, 22%;
Overall Acceptance Rate 149 of 789 submissions, 19%

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Cited By

View all
  • (2024)Password Managers and Vault Application Security and Forensics: Research Challenges and Future OpportunitiesDigital Forensics and Cyber Crime10.1007/978-3-031-56583-0_3(31-53)Online publication date: 3-Apr-2024
  • (2023)"Would you give the same priority to the bank and a game? i do not!"Proceedings of the Nineteenth USENIX Conference on Usable Privacy and Security10.5555/3632186.3632196(171-190)Online publication date: 7-Aug-2023
  • (2022)Survey and Taxonomy of Adversarial Reconnaissance TechniquesACM Computing Surveys10.1145/353870455:6(1-38)Online publication date: 7-Dec-2022
  • (2021)They Would do Better if They Worked Together: The Case of Interaction Problems Between Password Managers and Websites2021 IEEE Symposium on Security and Privacy (SP)10.1109/SP40001.2021.00094(1367-1381)Online publication date: May-2021
  • (2021)Intelligent and Secure Autofill System in Web BrowsersProceedings of the 12th International Conference on Soft Computing and Pattern Recognition (SoCPaR 2020)10.1007/978-3-030-73689-7_2(10-19)Online publication date: 16-Apr-2021
  • (2020)Password Managers—It’s All about Trust and TransparencyFuture Internet10.3390/fi1211018912:11(189)Online publication date: 30-Oct-2020
  • (2020)A Pedagogic Analysis of Information Systems Security Measures in Online Services2020 15th International Conference for Internet Technology and Secured Transactions (ICITST)10.23919/ICITST51030.2020.9351325(1-6)Online publication date: 8-Dec-2020
  • (2016)Passwords Management via Split-KeyJournal of Information Security10.4236/jis.2016.7301607:03(206-214)Online publication date: 2016
  • (2016)An Empirical Study of Mnemonic Sentence-based Password Generation StrategiesProceedings of the 2016 ACM SIGSAC Conference on Computer and Communications Security10.1145/2976749.2978346(1216-1229)Online publication date: 24-Oct-2016
  • (2016)UniPassProceedings of the 2016 ACM International Joint Conference on Pervasive and Ubiquitous Computing10.1145/2971648.2971722(49-60)Online publication date: 12-Sep-2016
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