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I don't think this tool says anything of value. A quick experiment: PHASE 1 1. Seed a first character with Lastpass password generator with all character clas
by shawn-furyan 13y ago
I don't think this tool says anything of value. A quick experiment:
PHASE 1
1. Seed a first character with Lastpass password generator with all character classes enabled. Turns out to be an 'x'
2. Try the entire possible keyspace in the second character slot to see which characters are "expected". This turns out to be all but members of the set (h,H,b,B,n,N,6,8,~,#). That is, of 94 possible character (on my keyboard) 84 are "expected". That's 89% of the keyspace.
OK, so perhaps we can explain this by the simple expedient of the fact that any 2 character password is bruteforceable, though if this is the true explanation, I'm not sure why h,H,b,B,n,N,6,8,~, and # should be singled out as unpredictable.
Phase 2 tests whether password length explains the phenomenon of the applications seemingly lax definition of "expected".
PHASE 2
1. Seed first 31 characters with Lastpass password generator. This turns out to be 't4lzV%geWagnJW3&3tntDBWI5K0eL' (without the enclosing single quotes). Significantly, the app only considers 4 of the characters in this supposedly (pseudo)randomly generated 31 character string to be "unexpected".
2. Same as above, try each key in the entire keyspace to fill in the 32nd character slot. Again, all possible values are considered expected save for members of the set (a, A, l, L, e, E, 1, 3, 4, 7, @, ^, &). So the app "expects" 81 out of 94 possible values at that 32nd character slot. This constitutes 86% of the keyspace.
So... apparently bruteforceability doesn't explain the first result.
The prediction model seems to be so wildly unrealistic in judging the predictability of a password (or even in fact a particular character within a password) as to be completely unusable for any practical purpose. In fact, limiting your passwords to strings that maximize the number of "unexpected" characters seems incredibly ill-advised as it mainly reduces your keyspace on a per-character basis to ~15% of its potential size. And since this application exists and is accessible to everyone, it can be integrated into password cracking attempts (especially if the algorithm is published).