1 research outputs found
PALPAS - PAsswordLess PAssword Synchronization
Tools that synchronize passwords over several user devices typically store
the encrypted passwords in a central online database. For encryption, a
low-entropy, password-based key is used. Such a database may be subject to
unauthorized access which can lead to the disclosure of all passwords by an
offline brute-force attack. In this paper, we present PALPAS, a secure and
user-friendly tool that synchronizes passwords between user devices without
storing information about them centrally. The idea of PALPAS is to generate a
password from a high entropy secret shared by all devices and a random salt
value for each service. Only the salt values are stored on a server but not the
secret. The salt enables the user devices to generate the same password but is
statistically independent of the password. In order for PALPAS to generate
passwords according to different password policies, we also present a mechanism
that automatically retrieves and processes the password requirements of
services. PALPAS users need to only memorize a single password and the setup of
PALPAS on a further device demands only a one-time transfer of few static data.Comment: An extended abstract of this work appears in the proceedings of ARES
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