4 ms·
Assume there are 7500 very commonly used english words. A three word sentence, all in lower case, would yield 421 Billion permutations. Let's say, of those 42
by juiceandjuice 16y ago
Assume there are 7500 very commonly used english words. A three word sentence, all in lower case, would yield 421 Billion permutations. Let's say, of those 421 billion permutations, which don't tense or plural nouns about 1 in 5 are familiar english language constructs, which drops down to around 20 billion permutations. In this case, if we took all capital letters, all numbers, and 6 punctuation characters, we'd end up with ~67 unique characters, for a combined 82 billion permutations.
Furthermore, like Richard Feynman discovered in Los Alamos, you could narrow down the possibilities of combinations if you know something about a person. You could probably build profiled dictionary attacks and reduce possibilities a lot.
So, is it more secure? No, it's maybe equally secure, but it would completely depend on the attack. A combination of capital letters would probably be more secure though.
- juiceandjuice 16y agoI thought about this a bit more and, in reality, the amount of english words used could probably be cut down to less than 1000, which would cut down to 1/400th of my original figure. So no, I don't think it's more secure against advanced dictionary attacks.
- ezy 16y agoOne obvious solution: Don't use english, and don't use standard word order.
- qjz 16y agoExcept your recommendation reduces available entropy. It would be better to randomly mix words from multiple languages and disregard word order. No matter what algorithmic approach you use, you need to exclude results that are cracked easily by existing methods.
- T-hawk 16y ago>if we took all capital letters, all numbers, and 6 punctuation characters, we'd end up with ~67 unique characters, for a combined 82 billion permutations. 82 billion may sound like a lot but it is not. Suppose you had a few multi-core machines that could collectively get up to 1 million crack attempts per second. Now you can crack that password in 82,000 seconds, or under one day.