Password Security as a Game of Entropies

Abstract

We consider a formal model of password security, in which two actors engage in a competition of optimal password choice against potential attacks. The proposed model is a multi-objective two-person game. Player 1 seeks an optimal password choice policy, optimizing matters of memorability of the password (measured by Shannon entropy), opposed to the difficulty for player 2 of guessing it (measured by min-entropy), and the cognitive efforts of player 1 tied to changing the password (measured by relative entropy, i.e., Kullback-Leibler divergence). The model and contribution are thus twofold: (i) it applies multi-objective game theory to the password security problem; and (ii) it introduces different concepts of entropy to measure the quality of a password choice process under different angles (and not a given password itself, since this cannot be quality-assessed in terms of entropy). We illustrate our approach with an example from everyday life, namely we analyze the password choices of employees.