Generating look-alike names for security challenges

Motivated by the need to automatically generate behavior-based security challenges to improve user authentication for web services, we consider the problem of large-scale construction of realistic-looking names to serve as aliases for real individuals. We aim to use these names to construct security challenges, where users are asked to identify their real contacts among a presented pool of names. We seek these look-alike names to preserve name characteristics like gender, ethnicity, and popularity, while being unlinkable back to the source individual, thereby making the real contacts not easily guessable by attackers. To achive this, we introduce the technique of distributed name embeddings, representing names in a high-dimensional space such that distance between name components reflects the degree of cultural similarity between these strings. We present different approaches to construct name embeddings from contact lists observed at a large web-mail provider, and evaluate their cultural coherence. We demonstrate that name embeddings strongly encode gender and ethnicity, as well as name popularity. We applied this algorithm to generate imitation names in email contact list challenge. Our controlled user study verified that the proposed technique reduced the attacker's success rate to 26.08%, indistinguishable from random guessing, compared to a success rate of 62.16% from previous name generation algorithms. Finally, we use these embeddings to produce an open synthetic name resource of 1 million names for security applications, constructed to respect both cultural coherence and U.S. census name frequencies.