On the guessability of resident registration numbers in South Korea

Youngbae Song, Hyoungshick Kim, Jun Ho Huh

Research output: Chapter in Book/Report/Conference proceedingConference contributionpeer-review

2 Scopus citations

Abstract

This paper studies a potential risk of using real name verification systems that are prevalently used in Korean websites. Upon joining a website, users are required to enter their Resident Registration Number (RRN) to identify themselves. We adapt guessing theory techniques to measure RRN security against a trawling attacker attempting to guess victim’s RRN using some personal information (such as name, sex, and location) that are publicly available (e.g., on Facebook). We evaluate the feasibility of performing statistical-guessing attacks using a real-world dataset consisting of 2,326 valid name and RRN pairs collected from several Chinese websites such as Baidu. Our results show that about 4,892.5 trials are needed on average to correctly guess a RRN. Compared to the brute-force attack, our statistical-guessing attack, on average, runs about 6.74 times faster.

Original languageEnglish
Title of host publicationInformation Security and Privacy - 21st Australasian Conference, ACISP 2016, Proceedings
EditorsJoseph K. Liu, Ron Steinfeld
PublisherSpringer Verlag
Pages128-138
Number of pages11
ISBN (Print)9783319402529
DOIs
StatePublished - 2016
Event21st Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy, ACISP 2016 - Melbourne, Australia
Duration: 4 Jul 20166 Jul 2016

Publication series

NameLecture Notes in Computer Science (including subseries Lecture Notes in Artificial Intelligence and Lecture Notes in Bioinformatics)
Volume9722
ISSN (Print)0302-9743
ISSN (Electronic)1611-3349

Conference

Conference21st Australasian Conference on Information Security and Privacy, ACISP 2016
Country/TerritoryAustralia
CityMelbourne
Period4/07/166/07/16

Keywords

  • Brute-force attack
  • Korean identification system
  • Resident registration number
  • Statistical-guessing attack

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