Poster: Context-Based Effective Password Detection in Plaintext
Manish Shukla, Shubham Malaviya, Sachin Lodha · 2024
From an enterprise perspective, storage of passwords in plaintext on a computer hard disk is a serious concern. Such password storage practice helps a malicious agent to do privilege escalation, install a backdoor, disable critical monitoring tools, and allow them to laterally move within organization's network. Considering the exploitability of the plaintext password stored on a storage device, it is imperative for an organization to identify such files and safeguard them without causing disruption to a user's work routine. In this work, we present a context-based password discovery solution for plaintext that performs multi-step context discovery for reducing false positives and negatives. Moreover, we protect all the identified files using an on-the-fly user authentication layer, which helps in preventing automated or command-line-based access to sensitive content in case of a cyberattack.