How Does Social Behavior Affect Your Password?

Abstract

A password is an important method of identity authentication, so there are endless research attempts on passwords, but most of them are based on different languages and technologies. As far as we know, no one has studied the influence of one's social behavior (e.g., religious belief) on passwords. Based on this, we first study the influence of religion on the generation of user passwords. Taking Christianity as an example, we find that the passwords of Christians have very strong similarities by analyzing the popular passwords, password structure, letter distribution and length distribution. Furthermore, we find that they contain many words that stem from the Bible, such as Jesus, the Sun, and so on. In order to explore the influence of religious beliefs on password generation, we also select two ordinary social password datasets of non-Christians, and find that they have different characteristics. Finally, we use the classic PCFG attack method to test the anti-attack ability of the Christian password datasets and the ordinary password datasets. Interestingly, we come to the conclusion that the ability of Christian password datasets to resist attacks has a strong similarity, while ordinary password datasets do not have this feature. In particular, by adding Christian information to the rule generated by the ordinary password datasets, we show that it can effectively improve the cracking rate of password attacks.