2 ms·

What alphanumeric password length would be sufficient enough to still be protected with only 1000 or 5000 iterations?

• kadoban 4y ago
  I don't have great values for the constants, and it's a bit of a question of who your expected adversary is, but assuming a randomly generated alphanumeric password, the equation should be something like: Expected time to break = 1/2 * 36^L * iterations / (hashes per second your adversary can do) So you'd want to pick how long you want this to remain secure (~50 years is probably beyond good enough). For hashes, a _very_ conservative choice might be something like the hashes per second done in all of Bitcoin, worldwide. One arbitrary result in Google suggests that that is 286,767,038,956,306,900,000 H/s. If I did the math right, that works out to 17-18 characters long for 1000 iterations. The number of hashes per second there is obviously way too big, but I'm uncomfortable picking a lower one without doing more research than I'm interested in doing. There's probably a recommendation from some security experts out there somewhere, but I'd imagine it's going to be a bit of a struggle to get one of them to tell you anything except "use more than 1000 iterations".
  • e12e 4y ago
    18 random characters out of 36 is equivalent to ~93 bits of entropy[1]- that's pretty conservative indeed. I would aim for 70 bits (safely north of 64 bits) - the paranoid for 96..128 bits. [1] 18*log2(36) ~ 93
    • kadoban 4y ago
      Yeah that sounds safe, I did end up even more paranoid than I intended.