An Empirical Analysis of Passwords

Abstract

Almost every application and web service you join, require you to come with a password which is robust and strong enough to evade attacks. Password strength is a measure of degree to which a password is effective to any random attack. The strength of a password is a combination of length, numbers, complexity and randomness.The need to analyse the strength of a password is to flag weak passwords in order to improve password security. Although, there is not any rule that states a good password but certain guidelines can be followed to differentiate bad passwords. This paper primarily focuses on various authentication threats, steps to mitigate the threats and analysis of password strengths.