4 ms·

This might be computationally feasible in this lifetime for a simple app of sorts, but we are dealing with potentially an insane number of combinations that wou

• logicallee 12y ago
  You have considerably less trouble checking all 20-character passwords if you get to introspect on the program doing the checking though! (To see what character lets it advance to the following loop or otherwise changes its state; this is similar to a timing attack.) Without doing that, btw, I think you understate the difficulty of "calculating all possible 20 character passwords." It's not just that we 'still have trouble' doing it. If you just take lowercase a-z (and hell, even exclude Q,A,Z,M, and Y so that it's the same on all major keyboard layouts) you still get 20^20=100,000,000,000,000,000,000,000,000 combinations i.e. 10^26. Which at 1000 gigatries per second leaves you with 10^14 seconds, i.e. 3 years. Hey, it's not so bad :) If you add in upper and lowercase, 0-9, and these 32 characters, https://kb.wisc.edu/page.php?id=4073 https://kb.wisc.edu/page.php?id=4073 you get 94^20 = 2e+39 possibilities. That compares favorably with the number of grams in the whole solar system (something like 1.99E+33), including, obviously, the whole Earth, the sun, all the planets, etc. It's the number of grams in 1,000,000 of our solar systems. So don't expect us to start calculating all possible 20 character passwords anytime soon :)