Honeyword with Salt-Chlorine Generator to Enhance Security of Cloud User Credentials

Abstract

Cloud Computing plays a vital role in current IT sector. Every advantage of cloud comes with major security issues. Cloud credential security concern has been listed as top security threat in the Treacherous 12 by Cloud Security Alliance in 2016. The login credentials of a cloud user can be easily cracked with the existing tools. Honeywords are used to protect the passwords in password database. Honeywords are set of decoy passwords stored along with the legitimate password in hashed password database. Honeyword list along with the legitimate password are called as sweetword list. In current scenario the list of sweetwords can be stolen by launching brute force attack, dictionary attack or other password cracking attacks to the Hashed password database and the cloud user’s legitimate password can be inverted. To avoid such attacks an improvised salt generator named as Salt-Chlorine is proposed. Salt-chlorine algorithm generates highly unpredictable pseudo-random Salt to enhance the integrity of the cloud user account. Salt-Chlorine generator generates complex salts (SC) and SC is hashed with both the honeywords and cloud users legitimate password to confuse the attacker and to withstand the attacks on hashed password database. The proposed method increases the complexity of identifying the legitimate password in the list of sweetwords. The analysis demonstrates the privacy and security level of the passwords stored in cloud password database and the passwords are more secured than the existing schemes.