William Cameron | Beyond the Keyboard

Cryptographic researchers Ari Juels and Ronald Rivest (the "R" in RSA) have come up with an interesting idea aimed at helping to detect attacks on web application databases. It is based on storing fake passwords as bait and sounding the alarm when an attempt is subsequently made to use one of these fake passwords. The idea involves storing what they have dubbed "honeywords" for each user in the password database alongside their actual password. An attacker who gained access to the database would be unable to distinguish the honeywords, which would also be stored in the form of salted hashes, from the real password. If attackers were then able to crack the stolen hashes, they might well use them to try to log into the associated web application. If such an attempt were made using one of the honeywords, the web application would know that the access was unauthorised – since the account's legitimate owner has no access to the honeywords, any honeyword used must

This proved quite an interesting job, and took a bit of time to get this down  to a tee.  I do have a working version of some database tests which I will post at a later day with a complete working PHPUnit example of using a YAML dataset for tests. keep watching.

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