3 ms·
It's not possible to look at a password and determine how long it would take to crack it, without knowing how it was generated. All you can say is how long it w
by gwillen 13y ago
It's not possible to look at a password and determine how long it would take to crack it, without knowing how it was generated. All you can say is how long it would take _you_ to crack it. But just because a password looks hard to YOU, doesn't mean it's not a dictionary word in Bulgarian or something. There's no way for you to know.
- personalcompute 13y agoIt's also not possible to look at a password and determine long it would take to crack, even knowing how it was generated (to the reasonable extent I believe you implied, ie Bulgarian or English). Your password may happen to be the first word in a dictionary list or it could be the last word. It is an inherently inaccurate probabilistic estimation of an attacker's methods, and does make any claim of being more than that.
- gwillen 13y agoIf you know a password generation algorithm, you can compute a lower bound on the average time to crack a password given that it was generated by that algorithm. Some individual password might happen to get unlucky, but you can still have a good general idea of the strength of a password if you know the set it was drawn from and the distribution.