Stability of password authentication in infocommunication networks

Abstract

The article discusses distributed infocommunication networks, in which the interaction of users, application servers and databases is carried out. When accessing an infocommunication network, the first procedure is to authenticate the agents through their authentication by password mechanism. It is shown that for social networks with a large number of users, widely used assessment of the security of password systems based on the calculation of the determination probability is not sufficient. The probability of the same passwords for two users with a password length of 6, 7 and 8 characters with alphabet size of 36, 42 and 57 characters and the number of users no more than 10 million is shown. An assessment of the strength of password authentication systems for info-communication networks based on the "birthday paradox" criterion is given. It has been determined that well-known social networks with a number of users comparable to the number of passwords used are not resistant to "birthday attacks". It is shown that for such systems the resistance of the password system to cracking should be assessed by  m=A^n/2      criterion.