A METHOD FOR ENCRYPTING PASSWORDS BASED ON BIOGRAPHICAL FACTS TO IMPROVE THE SECURITY OF ELECTRONIC ACCOUNTS IN FORENSIC CLASSES DURING STAFF TRAINING IN LAW FACULTIES УДК 343.98:004.056

Abstract

Recently, the number of cases of hacking of user accounts has increased. Among the services and applications to which access has been lost are not only entertainment services and applications, but also those related to education and work. Some services store a large amount of personal data of users, which leads to attackers gaining access to this data for their subsequent use in criminal activities, for example, there are frequent cases of issuing loans fraudulent schemes. As part of teaching the “Forensics” course, a password encryption algorithm was developed and used specifically for students, based on biographical facts from the lives of the students themselves, which is provided to students within the framework of the topic “Forensic methods for studying of a criminal personality.” At the end of the lesson, the bundle with these passwords remains in the hands of the students themselves and is not shown to anyone, however, notes with passwords based on this bundle can be in plain sight for everyone, without fear of hacking, since they were recorded using a code in which is based on biographical facts from the lives of the students themselves. The advantages of this method are creating a unique password, the absence of the need to use special programs, applications and services, universality of use in most services and applications, high reliability and protection against hacking by methods associated with brute force password guessing ("brute force") and high protection against decryption. The disadvantages of this method are the direct dependence on actual knowledge of one’s own biography, verbatim knowledge of letters and numbers from these facts, significant time spent typing such passwords to access accounts, vulnerability to a keylogger (“keylogger”), while persons who know the user’s biography well, can carry out successful hacking using the Hydra program. In addition, this method will not work for some services, sites, applications and programs that have restrictions on the number of characters in the password, although such a password will take up the maximum possible space.