Quantum Adiabatic Generation of Human-Like Passwords

TL;DR

This paper explores the use of adiabatic quantum computing to generate human-like passwords, demonstrating that small samples can produce realistic passwords on a 256-qubit quantum computer.

Contribution

It introduces novel quantum encoding methods for password generation and demonstrates their effectiveness on a neutral atom quantum computer.

Findings

Generated passwords resemble human behavior

Small samples of 128 passwords are sufficient

Quantum approach is feasible with current hardware

Abstract

Generative Artificial Intelligence (GenAI) for Natural Language Processing (NLP) is the predominant AI technology to date. An important perspective for Quantum Computing (QC) is the question whether QC has the potential to reduce the vast resource requirements for training and operating GenAI models. While large-scale generative NLP tasks are currently out of reach for practical quantum computers, the generation of short semantic structures such as passwords is not. Generating passwords that mimic real user behavior has many applications, for example to test an authentication system against realistic threat models. Classical password generation via deep learning have recently been investigated with significant progress in their ability to generate novel, realistic password candidates. In the present work we investigate the utility of adiabatic quantum computers for this task. More precisely, we study different encodings of token strings and propose novel approaches based on the Quadratic Unconstrained Binary Optimization (QUBO) and the Unit-Disk Maximum Independent Set (UD-MIS) problems. Our approach allows us to estimate the token distribution from data and adiabatically prepare a quantum state from which we eventually sample the generated passwords via measurements. Our results show that relatively small samples of 128 passwords, generated on the QuEra Aquila 256-qubit neutral atom quantum computer, contain human-like passwords such as "Tunas200992" or "teedem28iglove".