The Effect of Internet Slang on the Security of Passphrases Against a Dictionary Attack

The prevalence of computer systems in modern society demands protection for information stored in online accounts. While passwords have been the standard security measure for decades, passphrases offer a longer and harder-to-guess alternative. The purpose of this study was to improve the strength of passphrases with uncommon, culturally specific terms. It was hypothesized that as the number of internet slang words in a three-word passphrase increases, the time it takes to crack the passphrase using a simulated dictionary attack would increase due to the more unique words being less likely to be matched using words from a dictionary. A passphrase was generated and then repeatedly guessed by another passphrase generator that tweaked the word composition until the guess was correct. The data was determined to have a statistically significant difference in the mean time taken to crack a passphrase across the four levels of the number of internet slang words (F(3, 116) = 119, p = 0.033). The Post-Hoc Tukey test revealed one significant group between one and three words. It was found that the strength of passphrases increased when the number of internet slang words increased. These results imply that the hypothesis was partially supported and that while the presence of internet slang may not improve the security of a passphrase, the time taken to crack a three-word passphrase would increase as the number of internet slang words in a passphrase increased. The study suggests the use of internet slang would improve passphrase strength.