Password typographical error resilience in honey encryption

Abstract

Honey encryption (HE) is a novel password-based encryption scheme that is secure against brute-force attacks even if users' passwords have min-entropy. However, in HE, decryption with an incorrect key produces fake messages that appear valid. Hence, password typographical errors may confuse even legitimate users. This has been one of the most challenging problems in HE. To tackle this challenge, we propose three types of protocols that enable legitimate users to detect password typographical errors in HE. We conducted a theoretical analysis and performed an IRB-approved user study with 150 participants to compare the performance of each scheme. We also analyzed the security of the proposed schemes against online and offline brute-force attacks. The results from the user study and theoretical analysis show that the proposed schemes can effectively solve the typographical error problem of HE, which can detect typographical errors with 99% accuracy. (C) 2018 Elsevier Ltd. All rights reserved.