4 ms·
Agreed on password manager, but I still think the decrease is significant. I won't run my mouth further and might try to quantify that decrease over the holiday
by arenaninja 12y ago
Agreed on password manager, but I still think the decrease is significant. I won't run my mouth further and might try to quantify that decrease over the holidays.
- akerl_ 12y agoI like round numbers, so lets say that we've got 26 lowercase, 26 uppercase, 10 numbers, and 18 symbols, for a total pool of 80 character options. For our single lame character, you're stuck with 26. All calculations are rounded off to make them a bit less insane to read. Assuming a 10 character password, there are 1.07 × 10^19 combinations without the restriction, 3.5 × 10^18 combinations with the restriction. If we're dealing with a 24 character password, like my password manager slings out, it's 4.7 × 10^45 vs 1.5 × 10^45. As you can see, it definitely reduces the keyspace, but when you look at the overall impact it's rather small.
- arenaninja 12y agoIn both cases, the decrease you quote is about sqrt(10). It does taper off when you do a 24 character password (which is about the range of what I would choose), but it's still 30%; 70% of a large number is a large number. Typical users are not so technical as to use a 24 character password and therefore, in an unsalted leak, after the rainbow tables stage, it makes it 30% easier to brute-force them (going by your numbers).