Efficient Dictionary for Salted Password Analysis

User authentication is essential for accessing computing resources, network resources, email accounts, online portals etc. To authenticate a user, system stores user credentials (user id and password pair) in system. It has been an interested field problem to discover user password from a system and similarly protecting them against any such possible attack. In this work we show that passwords are still vulnerable to hash chain based and efficient dictionary attacks. Human generated passwords use some identifiable patterns. We have analysed a sample of 19 million passwords, of different lengths, available online and studied the distribution of the symbols in the password strings. We show that the distribution of symbols in user passwords is affected by the native language of the user. From symbol distributions we can build smart and efficient dictionaries, which are smaller in size and their coverage of plausible passwords from Key-space is large. These smart dictionaries make dictionary based attacks practical.