4 ms·

Guess what? Back in 2009, I started using a method to remember long passwords with a huge # of letters, numbers, & special characters. Gw?Bi2009Isuamtrlpwah#ol

Guess what? Back in 2009, I started using a method to remember long passwords with a huge # of letters, numbers, & special characters. Gw?Bi2009Isuamtrlpwah#ol,n,&sc. (31 characters) Create memorable sentences and create a password using the first letter of each word & all the numbers and punctuation. After entering it 10 or so times you'll get used to it pretty quickly.

phpnode 14y ago
or you can literally write the whole sentence, which is even more secure and you don't have to remember any special rules, just the sentence itself. Of course it's more typing: Guess what? Back in 2009 I saw a uniquely attired man traipsing round local places with a high number of legs, necks and shirt collars. 136 characters or 14 Gigayears to crack. Wow today I learnt that there's such a thing as a Gigayear.
- sunraa 14y ago
  I just went through the process of changing passwords to sentences. You'd be surprised at how many sites do not allow sentences.
  - ccheney 14y ago
    What irks me is when they reject special characters like ?!#$@", etc.
  - SageRaven 14y ago
    I use a password manager, and I have a unique password per site. I generally try to use an MD5 hash resulting from a "ps waux | md5" at the time of registration. I've encountered sites that rejected this due to lack of upper characters (oracle.com, which then allowed me to use "Abc123"), having no special characters, being too long (often forcing me to down-size to 16 or 8 chars). The worst are sites that silently truncate long passwords (I'm guessing due to code errors), so your password is invalid the second you register and must immediately proceed with a password reset. Big sites are generally good about allowing long/strong passwords. Many mom-n-pop sites are often hit-or-miss.
- apawloski 14y ago
  Well, to be fair, 14 Gigayears in terms of an attack geared towards a totally different case. I wonder if we can optimize an attack on sentence passwords using hidden markov modeling, or other natural language processing methods. The entropy at the character level decreases if we assume the password is an english sentence [1], and my gut feeling is that we can apply this same thinking at the word level as well (this may very well have been demonstrated already in research). [1] http://www.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/cryptography%20hints.html http://www.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/cryptograp...
  - phpnode 14y ago
    I thought about that, but presumably since so very few people use sentence based passwords, crackers don't optimize for this use case yet. Regardless it's quite a long sentence and that should afford some additional protection against this kind of attack, i can imagine 3 or 4 word sentences being defeated by this kind of technique, 30 words seems a lot more difficult
    - apawloski 14y ago
      This is purely a thought experiment at this point, but it would actually be a pretty interesting project. I wonder if it's true that longer sentences would be more secure -- or perhaps entropy decreases with larger inputs that give more data to analyze. In the cipher world this would be true, but for O(1) hashes, I'm curious how this could be tested. Edit Ultimately security from these types of attack would be with unusual/non-sensical adject/noun, adverb/verb pairs etc -- which your example does reasonably well. Picking a bible verse (for example) would be bad, though.
      - phpnode 14y ago
        The problem is that you have no hints about what is correct or not because presumably a one way hash is being used, so even if you get the first 29 words right, you don't know that. Assuming the cracker just uses a wordlist containing 200,000 terms and unsophisticated brute force, this thing could crack a 3 word password in a day and a 4 word password in 800 years[1]. It would certainly be an interesting project, but I honestly think this is a safe approach for now. [1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28200000**4+%2F+63+billion%29+seconds http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28200000**4+%2F+63+bil...

phpnode 14y ago

or you can literally write the whole sentence, which is even more secure and you don't have to remember any special rules, just the sentence itself. Of course it's more typing: Guess what? Back in 2009 I saw a uniquely attired man traipsing round local places with a high number of legs, necks and shirt collars. 136 characters or 14 Gigayears to crack. Wow today I learnt that there's such a thing as a Gigayear.

sunraa 14y ago
I just went through the process of changing passwords to sentences. You'd be surprised at how many sites do not allow sentences.
- ccheney 14y ago
  What irks me is when they reject special characters like ?!#$@", etc.
- SageRaven 14y ago
  I use a password manager, and I have a unique password per site. I generally try to use an MD5 hash resulting from a "ps waux | md5" at the time of registration. I've encountered sites that rejected this due to lack of upper characters (oracle.com, which then allowed me to use "Abc123"), having no special characters, being too long (often forcing me to down-size to 16 or 8 chars). The worst are sites that silently truncate long passwords (I'm guessing due to code errors), so your password is invalid the second you register and must immediately proceed with a password reset. Big sites are generally good about allowing long/strong passwords. Many mom-n-pop sites are often hit-or-miss.
apawloski 14y ago
Well, to be fair, 14 Gigayears in terms of an attack geared towards a totally different case. I wonder if we can optimize an attack on sentence passwords using hidden markov modeling, or other natural language processing methods. The entropy at the character level decreases if we assume the password is an english sentence [1], and my gut feeling is that we can apply this same thinking at the word level as well (this may very well have been demonstrated already in research). [1] http://www.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/cryptography%20hints.html http://www.nd.edu/~busiforc/handouts/cryptography/cryptograp...
- phpnode 14y ago
  I thought about that, but presumably since so very few people use sentence based passwords, crackers don't optimize for this use case yet. Regardless it's quite a long sentence and that should afford some additional protection against this kind of attack, i can imagine 3 or 4 word sentences being defeated by this kind of technique, 30 words seems a lot more difficult
  - apawloski 14y ago
    This is purely a thought experiment at this point, but it would actually be a pretty interesting project. I wonder if it's true that longer sentences would be more secure -- or perhaps entropy decreases with larger inputs that give more data to analyze. In the cipher world this would be true, but for O(1) hashes, I'm curious how this could be tested. Edit Ultimately security from these types of attack would be with unusual/non-sensical adject/noun, adverb/verb pairs etc -- which your example does reasonably well. Picking a bible verse (for example) would be bad, though.
    - phpnode 14y ago
      The problem is that you have no hints about what is correct or not because presumably a one way hash is being used, so even if you get the first 29 words right, you don't know that. Assuming the cracker just uses a wordlist containing 200,000 terms and unsophisticated brute force, this thing could crack a 3 word password in a day and a 4 word password in 800 years[1]. It would certainly be an interesting project, but I honestly think this is a safe approach for now. [1] http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28200000**4+%2F+63+billion%29+seconds http://www.wolframalpha.com/input/?i=%28200000**4+%2F+63+bil...