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arXiv · 2306.06824

SE#PCFG: Semantically Enhanced PCFG for Password Analysis and Cracking

Yangde Wang·Weidong Qiu·Peng Tang·Hao Tian·Shujun Li
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Abstract

Much research has been done on user-generated textual passwords. Surprisingly, semantic information in such passwords remain under-investigated, with passwords created by English- and/or Chinese-speaking users being more studied with limited semantics. This paper fills this gap by proposing a general framework based on semantically enhanced PCFG (probabilistic context-free grammars) named SE#PCFG. It allowed us to consider 43 types of semantic information, the richest set considered so far, for password analysis. Applying SE#PCFG to 17 large leaked password databases of user speaking four languages (English, Chinese, German and French), we demonstrate its usefulness and report a wide range of new insights about password semantics at different levels such as cross-website password correlations. Furthermore, based on SE#PCFG and a new systematic smoothing method, we proposed the Semantically Enhanced Password Cracking Architecture (SEPCA), and compared its performance against three SOTA (state-of-the-art) benchmarks in terms of the password coverage rate: two other PCFG variants and neural network. Our experimental results showed that SEPCA outperformed all the three benchmarks consistently and significantly across 52 test cases, by up to 21.53%, 52.55% and 7.86%, respectively, at the user-level (with duplicate passwords). At the level of unique passwords, SEPCA also beats the three counterparts by up to 43.83%, 94.11% and 11.16%, respectively.

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Yangde Wang, Weidong Qiu, Peng Tang, Hao Tian, Shujun Li. 2025-03-26. SE#PCFG: Semantically Enhanced PCFG for Password Analysis and Cracking. https://doi.org/10.1109/tdsc.2025.3547773

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