How Password Strength Becomes a Weak Link for Honeywords

Passwords are used as the first layer of security in today's society. As cybercrime increases, the need for password security increases. The objective of this report is to share some progress on password security, specifically on honeywords, and their techniques. State-of-the-art honeyword generation techniques (HGT) are using newer machine learning models, such as Generative Adversarial Network (GAN), to create honeywords. One HGT, called HoneyGAN, was used to generate honey-words, in order to analyze the relationship between honeywords strength and password strength. Overall, it was determined that the weaker the password inputted, the weaker the honeyword generated with HoneyGAN, which suggests a limitation on the effectiveness of honeyword authentication systems.