5 ms·
Password Strength
- georgelyon 5y agoIf anyone needs to generate cryptographically safe passwords that are easy to remember, I recommend this cool app that runs on dice: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diceware https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Diceware
- ncmncm 5y agoThis is about the worst imaginable way to generate entropy for password, unless the goal is to waste lots of time.
- bradknowles 5y agoDiceware is the source of the method suggested by xkcd. Both versions are easily implemented in a wide variety of password generation programs.
- usrbinbash 5y agoYep. And yet many many many people are taught the holy triad of "at least one uppercase one lowercase and one special character!" Since most strings following these rules are hard to remember, and humans being humans, we get passwords that follow simple, predictable, and easily guessable patterns like aAbBcCdD1234! Follows every rule in the holy triad and is likely to be cracked in seconds from some rainbow table.
- karmakaze 5y agoThere are two points to add: (1) If you use a randomly generated password of upper/lower/punctuation that's 63^length; (2) Four words is vocabulary^4. One breakeven point is 63^10 (9.8e17) ~ 20000^4 (1.6e17). This is being quite generous to the four words as the likelyhood of word selection from the vocabulary would be far from uniform. Also offset by the fact that shorter length passwords are brute-forced. If four-words became the dominant meta then we could instead have brute force applied to the word dictionary forms.
- ncmncm 5y agoUse shuf(1) to pick words reliably randomly from /use/share/dict/ dictionaries. It is not a mistake to misspell the words proposed, but not necessary. Preserving capitalization is not necessary.