I recently read a paper on the topic of strong passwords. While going through it, it hit me that very often people will discuss a way of solving some problem (phishing for example), but they fail to enumerate what the attack vectors are and subsequently how the solution addresses these attack vectors. I like how the paper actually lists the threats at the very beginning and discusses them throughout. When solving a problem or coming up with a security product, one should be very clear as to what it is protecting against. It is not often that you see this clearly addressed.

I don’t quite agree with all the views presented in this paper, but it was overall a very interesting read. The idea of brute-forcing not only a single account but all accounts based on statistics was an approach I had not seen before.