3 ms·
It's actually much more than 3 times the chance; this rule allows you to restrict your brute force search to only check passwords with no uppercase characters (
by FaceKicker 14y ago
It's actually much more than 3 times the chance; this rule allows you to restrict your brute force search to only check passwords with no uppercase characters (or no lowercase characters) which reduces the key space for a given maximum password length quite a bit. (e.g., if there were normally 100 characters allowed and n is the max length, taking out 26 characters reduces the search space from 100^n to 74^n - not that an intelligent password cracker would ever try to iterate straight through the actual space of all allowable passwords)
- eshrews 14y agoRead the article again, its not making the passwords case insensitive, merely allowing you to invert the case. i.e. if your password was "aSdf" neither "ASDF" nor "asdf" would work.
- deleted 14y ago[deleted]
- FaceKicker 14y agoWell I feel dumb, sorry. I thought he meant original casing + all lowercase version + all uppercase version were all acceptable (which isn't the same as case insensitive but for the purposes of cracking it is just as bad).
- tlrobinson 14y agoIf you don't use Windows you definitely shouldn't feel dumb: if caps lock is enabled on Windows shift will cause you to type a lower case letter, thus inverting what you intended to type rather than uppercasing everything. I was confused until I realized the caps lock case only applies to Windows users.
- FaceKicker 14y agoI've been using OSX as my primary OS for about a year (other than using Linux exclusively on every machine I SSH into for dev), but I just found out from your post that caps lock + shift doesn't make things lowercase on Mac. So, nope, I have no excuses :P
- Lockyy 14y agoActually, caps lock + shift gives lower-case in ubuntu as well.
- jameshawkins 14y agoThat's not necessarily true -- it doesn't allow you to eliminate all uppercase // lowercase situations. You still have to have the correct casing, just inverted (as though Caps Lock was on). Since my FB password has both uppercase and lowercase letters, the inverted case would still have uppercase and lowercase. There is no option that I can use for my current password that is all lowercase or all uppercase.