> Also interesting that a password based on word-and-number games, an approach that has been criticized lately as vulnerable to new attacks using common passwor

> Also interesting that a password based on word-and-number games, an approach that has been criticized lately as vulnerable to new attacks using common password fragments, seems to have flummoxed the pros in this case anyway. If you're talking about the Ars Technica article that showed that crackers are using common passages from books and movies, it's worth nothing that it's not some kind of issue with passphrases, just the construction of them. It is not a bad thing to use a passphrase (the Ars article implied that by saying "your long password isn't safe either," or something to that effect.) It is a bad thing to use a passphrase that is not randomly constructed. It's just the same for passwords, and, indeed, cryptographic keys. It's a numbers game. If it's not random, there's a pattern/bias. If there's a bias, an attacker can exploit that. If there's no bias--i.e. the words of a passphrase were truly randomly selected--then there is no method to crack it more effective than brute force.