Packaging the PwnedPassword data set

01 May 2019

The Pwned Password data set contains 551,509,767 sha1 hashes from passwords exposed in data breaches. Troy Hunt has provided an API for searching this data, but interacting with a third-party service is not always an option. A third-party service may have concerns about privacy, availability, and reliability. The size of the data set makes it difficult to include in a web application, just the hashes are about 21 GB. I spent some time investigating what is required to package this data as a SQLite database and as a bloom filter for the JVM.

SQLite Database

Each data point contains a sha1 hash and the number of times that password appeared in a breach

➜ head pwned-passwords-sha1-ordered-by-hash-v4.txt

I removed the number of occurrences to reduce the size of the data set and speed up subsequent commands

time sed -i '' -e 's/:.*$//g' pwned-passwords-sha1-ordered-by-hash-v4.txt
sed -i '' -e 's/:.*$//g' pwned-passwords-sha1-ordered-by-hash-v4.txt  1497.24s user 110.03s system 93% cpu 28:40.04 total

Creating the SQLite database was very simple with the built in .import command. This command will insert each line in a file into a table, so no custom script is necessary. Just the following four commands creates the database and schema, inserts the data, and creates an index on the hashes column:

➜  sqlite3 pwnedpassed.db
SQLite version 3.24.0 2018-06-04 14:10:15
Enter ".help" for usage hints.
sqlite> CREATE TABLE hashes(hash TEXT);
CREATE TABLE hashes(hash TEXT);
sqlite> .import pwned-passwords-sha1-ordered-by-hash-v4.txt hashes
sqlite> CREATE INDEX hashes_index ON hashes (hash);

Importing the data set took 43 minutes and creating the index took another 44 minutes on my 2015 Macbook Air. Querying for a hash is incredibly fast, the sqlite timer rounds the query execution time to 0.000 seconds!

sqlite> .timer ON
sqlite> select * from hashes where hash = "0000000A0E3B9F25FF41DE4B5AC238C2D545C7A8";
Run Time: real 0.000 user 0.000153 sys 0.000121
sqlite> .exit

Inserting the data created a 26 GB database, then creating the index doubled the size to 52 GB.

Bloom Filter

An alternative to including a 52 GB database in a deployment is transforming the data into a bloom filter. The bloom filter data structure considerably shrinks the size of the data set with some trade offs. There is a false positive rate when checking if a data point is in the set and the program must keep the bloom filter object in memory.

I’ve provided some code to convert the set hashes into a bloom filter. The code uses Google Guava for a bloom filter implementation. An example of running the program:

➜  sbt "run -d data/pwned-passwords-sha1-ordered-by-count-v4.txt -r 0.001 -o pwnedpassword-bloomfilter.object" -warn
[+] Generating bloom filter ...
[+] Bloom filter generated, storing result to pwnedpassword-bloomfilter.object
[+] Generation took 979 seconds, the filter is 991172969 bytes on disk

That command generated a bloom filter with a false positive rate of 0.1%, then serialized the object and stored it to disk in the pwnedpassword-bloomfilter.object file. The false positive rate plays a big role in the size of the object, the generated filter is 945 MB. Reducing the false positive rate to 1% results in much smaller, but still big 630 MB file. Both of these objects took about 15-20 minutes to create.

Once the filter is loaded into memory is can quickly check if a hash if part of the data set. I timed how long it took if a random hash was in the set, on average it took 75 microseconds.

Bloom Filter - Partial Coverage

Distributing and loading a 945 MB object into memory is still a big task. One way to reduce the size of the bloom filter without reducing the false positive rate is to only include the most common passwords as these will protect the most users. The original data set includes how many times each password was discovered in a breach. For example, here are the top 5 hashes and the occurrence count:


And the bottom 5 hashes:


Maybe it is possible to get a significant benefit from a small bloom filter that doesn’t encompass the entire data set. The code I provided can generate bloom filters with the first N number of hashes in the dataset.

Summing the occurrence column results in 3,344,070,078 total occurrences for 551,509,767 unique passwords. Below is a table showing the cumulative data for each 5% of the hashes:

Percentage of hashes Number of hashes Number of occurrences Percentage Of occurrences Bloom filter size
5% 27575488 2048204737 61.2% 47 MB
10% 55150976 2279531934 68.5% 95 MB
15% 82726464 2430473102 72.6% 142 MB
20% 110301952 2548624944 76.2% 189 MB
25% 137877440 2650193170 79.2% 236 MB
30% 165452928 2732919634 81.7% 284 MB
35% 193028416 2815646098 84.1% 331 MB
40% 220603904 2876599691 86.0% 378 MB
45% 248179392 2931750667 87.6% 425 MB
50% 275754880 2986901643 89.3% 473 MB
55% 303330368 3042052619 90.9% 520 MB
60% 330905856 3097203595 92.6% 567 MB
65% 358481344 3151041655 94.2% 614 MB
70% 386056832 3178617143 95.0% 662 MB
75% 413632320 3206192631 95.8% 709 MB
80% 441207808 3233768119 96.7% 756 MB
85% 468783296 3261343607 97.5% 803 MB
90% 496358784 3288919095 98.3% 851 MB
95% 523934272 3316494583 99.1% 898 MB
100% 551509760 3344070071 100% 945 MB

Graphing the hashes vs occurrences:

Unable to display chart

The first 5% of the hashes account for over 60% of occurrences! The first 5% provide the most value and only require a 47 MB bloom filter object. The first 10% of the hashes bumps that up to 68% of total occurrences for a 95 MB bloom filter. Each additional 5% of hashes has diminishing returns until roughly 40%. Depending on the requirements of the web application these small bloom filters can provide a lot of value.


Inserting the data set into a database is the best option. This provides 100% coverage, a 0% false positive rate, and extremely fast results. The draw back is this option requires a lot of disk storage, roughly 52 GB. If storing a large database is not an option, then a bloom filter is a great runner up. A bloom filter with 100% coverage and a 0.1% false positive rate requires ~945 MB of memory. Finally, if that is too much memory, 5% of the hashes results in a 47 MB bloom filter that covers 61% of the total occurrences.

Read more posts!