It turns out that emoticons are considered a symbol, so they can beef up your passwords and make them more secure in combination with letters and numbers. Here’s how.
Edit: plus brute forcing is just one scenario. I think the xkcd comic refers to using passwords in online services, and those usually have some sort of rate limiting.
8 character a-zA-Z is 45 bits of entropy (log2(56^8), about the same as the XKCD password if you take from a 2048 word list. That’s crackable in a minute on AWS.
Password hashes get frequently stolen, don’t rely on rate limiting if it’s something you really care about.
Sure, but the average English speaker knows way more than 2048 words. Let’s not forget about case sensitivity, made-up or “inside joke” words, names, and specific industry vocabulary.
Even if you take four words of a 30000 word list (quick Google says that’s the number of words an average person knows), that’s still less bits of entropy than a 5 word diceware password (7776 word list). People are also really bad at randomness, so your own string of random words is likely going to be much worse.
It’s the concept of literally using a die to choose with randomness (humans are terrible at trying to be random); a link with details is in a previous comment.
I prefer picking a sentence or so that has meaning to me, using the first letters, and then adjusting for numbers/symbols. So if I wanted to make that a pw, it’d be 1ppa505thm2m,utfl,atafn/5. -looks completely unintelligible, but as long as you can remember the sentence and have some ideas of how you would have encoded it, easy enough to remember/recreate.
It’s as easy to remember a bunch of those as it is remembering 4 random words with no association, I think. And besides, just use that for the big, important, pws like your pw manager.
The whole idea is to make it easier for humans to remember and more difficult to brute force. Long passwords are much harder to brute force than complex passwords with lots of special characters. And they’re a lot easier for humans to remember.
There are enough words in any language that it’s virtually impossible to guess the correct four words, even if they’re in the dictionary.
Even so, most password requirements will force you to add them anyway. Quick way to do it is to just pick a number on a keyboard and add it and the symbol to the end. e.g HorseBattery2# and so on.
And requirements like that are why my password strengths are completely out of whack:
Random websites get 24 randomly generated printable characters stored in my password manager. This is essentially unbreakable with conventional methods and can easily be adapted to fit whichever counterproductive rules the website enforces.
My password manager and my home computers get memorable but long phrases. A particular favorite is to start in the middle of a line from a song and continue from there. Nobody’s going to guess “make you swear and curse when you′re chewing on” but it’s easy to memorize of you already know the song. Even a dictionary attack is going to have trouble with that many words.
My work accounts get the bare minimum that complies with whichever rules the admins came up with. Numbers, special characters and mixed capitalization? No thirty letter phrase for you, then; you’ll get the minimum eight characters so I have a chance of memorizing the thing. Regular password changes? Great, now the last two chargers are going to be incrementing digits, just like for everyone else.
There’s a reason why experts these days argue against anything but minimum length restrictions.
xkcd still has the best approach to this; four random common words
I love it, Bitwarden has supported generating passphrase style passwords for a while and it’s basically that. It’s my go-to these days.
Four words is too low these days to protect against gpu bruteforcing
Got a source on that?
Edit: plus brute forcing is just one scenario. I think the xkcd comic refers to using passwords in online services, and those usually have some sort of rate limiting.
https://thesecurityfactory.be/password-cracking-speed/
8 character a-zA-Z is 45 bits of entropy (log2(56^8), about the same as the XKCD password if you take from a 2048 word list. That’s crackable in a minute on AWS.
Password hashes get frequently stolen, don’t rely on rate limiting if it’s something you really care about.
Here are the dice ware recommendations on the number of words: https://theworld.com/~reinhold/dicewarefaq.html#howlong
Sure, but the average English speaker knows way more than 2048 words. Let’s not forget about case sensitivity, made-up or “inside joke” words, names, and specific industry vocabulary.
Even if you take four words of a 30000 word list (quick Google says that’s the number of words an average person knows), that’s still less bits of entropy than a 5 word diceware password (7776 word list). People are also really bad at randomness, so your own string of random words is likely going to be much worse.
Thanks for the explanation. What’s diceware?
It’s the concept of literally using a die to choose with randomness (humans are terrible at trying to be random); a link with details is in a previous comment.
Thanks.
https://theworld.com/~reinhold/diceware.html
Thanks.
I prefer picking a sentence or so that has meaning to me, using the first letters, and then adjusting for numbers/symbols. So if I wanted to make that a pw, it’d be 1ppa505thm2m,utfl,atafn/5. -looks completely unintelligible, but as long as you can remember the sentence and have some ideas of how you would have encoded it, easy enough to remember/recreate.
good luck remembering all of those for every account you create, though.
It’s as easy to remember a bunch of those as it is remembering 4 random words with no association, I think. And besides, just use that for the big, important, pws like your pw manager.
Just be sure to throw in symbols and numbers to beef it up. Dictionary words are easier to brute force.
The whole idea is to make it easier for humans to remember and more difficult to brute force. Long passwords are much harder to brute force than complex passwords with lots of special characters. And they’re a lot easier for humans to remember.
There are enough words in any language that it’s virtually impossible to guess the correct four words, even if they’re in the dictionary.
Even so, most password requirements will force you to add them anyway. Quick way to do it is to just pick a number on a keyboard and add it and the symbol to the end. e.g HorseBattery2# and so on.
And requirements like that are why my password strengths are completely out of whack:
There’s a reason why experts these days argue against anything but minimum length restrictions.
You can even make a complete sentence that makes sense with symbols and numbers.
“Ronaldo doesn’t grill 76 Canadian Tacos.”
Or whatever
Not 4 of them in a row. Keep in mind the attacker doesn’t know " look for exactly 4 words"
That’s just security by obscurity. It’s one other strategy of choosing passwords that a bruteforce attack is going to try if it gets popular
Password database