Tripwire

Abstract

Password reuse has been long understood as a problem: credentials stolen from one site may be leveraged to gain access to another site for which they share a password. Indeed, it is broadly understood that attackers exploit this fact and routinely leverage credentials extracted from a site they have breached to access high-value accounts at other sites (e.g., email accounts). However, as a consequence of such acts, this same phenomena of password reuse attacks can be harnessed to indirectly infer site compromises---even those that would otherwise be unknown. In this paper we describe such a measurement technique, in which unique honey accounts are registered with individual third-party websites, and thus access to an email account provides indirect evidence of credentials theft at the corresponding website. We describe a prototype system, called Tripwire, that implements this technique using an automated Web account registration system combined with email account access data from a major email provider. In a pilot study monitoring more than 2,300 sites over a year, we have detected 19 site compromises, including what appears to be a plaintext password compromise at an Alexa top-500 site with more than 45 million active users.