Artificial Intelligence Just Made Guessing Your Password a Whole Lot Easier

Researchers at Stevens Institute of Technology used artificial intelligence to generate a program that successfully guessed 27 percent of the passwords from more than 43 million LinkedIn profiles. The team employed a generative adversarial network (GAN), PassGAN, featuring two artificial neural networks--a "generator" that produces artificial outputs resembling real examples, and a "discriminator" that attempts to differentiate real from false examples. New York University's Martin Arjovsky says the work "confirms that there are clear, important problems where applying simple machine-learning solutions can bring a crucial advantage."

However, Cornell Tech's Thomas Ristenpart says this same GAN-based methodology could be applied to help users and enterprises rate password strength, as well as "potentially be used to generate decoy passwords to help detect breaches."

Meanwhile, Stevens' Giuseppe Ateniese says PassGAN can invent passwords indefinitely, noting, "if you give enough data to PassGAN, it will be able to come up with rules that humans cannot think about."

From Science 
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