Nowadays, most people use password managers (hopefully). However, there are still some passwords that you need to memorize, like master password (for a password manager), phone lock, wifi password, etc.
Security wise, can passphrase reach the strength of a good password without getting so long that it defeats the purpose of even using it?
can passphrase reach the strength of a good password
Relevant xkcd: https://xkcd.com/936/
I’d love to hear from someone well versed in security if this is legit or significant weaknesses exist, but the math seems to check out as far as I can tell.
For what a civilian target would worry about, using sufficiently long passwords is your best defense. Complexity is barely important.
111111111111111111111111111.1111 is an excellent password.
Everyone should Ctrl+f their password here. But also wait the 10 minutes it’ll take to load the whole thing.
If your pw is on this list, change it immediately.
If it’s less than 8 chars? Change immediately. If it’s less than 10 chars? Change… Now.
If it’s less than 14 chars, consider just making your password longer.
This advice will save more people in its simplicity than saying more.
Want a smidge more?
If you’re paranoid, take a password that you think is decent, then insert it here, then use the output as your password.
Most times, pws aren’t stored in plain text, they’re stored using that algorithm. So, if your password is ‘password’, hackers night easily be able to see that your passwords encrypted value is exactly what that link will output if you put in ‘password’. If your password is on that huge list from the beginning of the post, they can easily decrypt the encrypted password, because these passwords’s hashes are known.
So, use the hash itself as a password.
Hell, throw a comma at the beginning to throw it off.
That’s basically a Diceware passphrase. And, it’s kinda ok. The amount of entropy is pretty significant (close to what the comic lists, if the Wikipedia article has it right). And it’s really easy to add more entropy. I often recommend passphrases to my users (I work in Cybersecurity) and use them myself. Take a sentence, with spaces, capitals and punctuation. Now throw in a few numbers for fun and stop worrying about brute force attacks, until some idiot decides unsalted MD5 is perfectly fine for storing passwords. Most such passphrases will blow right past the 4 words in that comic and are very easy to remember. Even better, make that the passphrase for your password vault (oh look a plug for KeePass). Then have the rest of your passwords all be unique, 20 character jumbles of letters, numbers, and special characters.
Also, enable Two-Factor Authentication (2FA) wherever possible. Even if it’s just a One Time Password (OTP) sent via SMS (which is a shit way to do 2FA), that’s better than no 2FA.
most people use password managers
You don’t know many boomers, do you?
Most people who matter
I do use a password manager, and a lot of my passwords are automatically generated piles of random ASCII.
There are of course passwords I have to key manually a lot; especially the master key of my password database. I often use pass phrases for these. The ones I have to commit to memory, or even need to key manually reading with my eyes from my database, or in the case of my Wi-Fi passwords tell to other people, I make these fairly human readable/typeable. Trying to key lFqvC3]gI~l8p2V6TvTY&p in is a pain in the ass even in a font that renders that uppercase I and lowercase L as different glyphs. Something like corrEct_horse battery staPle, well I worked in an underscore and two capitals in something I can still touch type pretty effectively. Don’t use correct horse battery staple as a password; it’s burned.
correct horse battery staple?
All I see is “****************************?”
What did you type?
Ok, this is a reasonable community to ask. What’s a FOSS pword manager that is easy to use, reliable, likely to be around and working in 5 years, and won’t leave me feeling shit up a creek if my phone dies or I’m using a public terminal with software installation restrictions? Been a few years, but I had not found something that worked well for me.
Bitwarden
Or if you want to selfhost, use Vaultwarden (compatible with Bitwarden official clients)
this, just works and very easy to use and backup if using docker.
What’s a FOSS pword manager
There are probably more that these two out there but the two I know of that fit this bill are Bitwarden and KeePass. The latter comes in two flavors, the original KeePass that kinda looks like shit and tries to stay lean and defer niche features to plugins, and the fork KeePassXC that tries to give it a sleeker UX with more features natively baked-in. I will refer to both simply as “KeePass” for the rest of this comment.
that is easy to use
“Easy to use” is relative. If you’re savvy enough to know what FOSS software even is, to care about using it, and to find your way onto an experimental platform like Lemmy to ask about it, I’d say youre more than capable of handling either of the above choices with ease.
reliable, likely to be around and working in 5 years
I’d wager that on both Bitwarden and KeePass.
and won’t leave me feeling shit up a creek if my phone dies or I’m using a public terminal with software installation restrictions
Bitwarden offers free cloud hosting and a web interface. As long as you have access to a browser and an Internet connection, you have access to your Bitwarden key store.
KeePass is offline-only and requires specialized client software to read its key store file format. Though, since all it is is a file, you can use simple and straightforward methods to make it accessible wherever you need it. Copy it to a flash drive. SCP it between devices. Put it on a cloud service like Dropbox. You have options. It’s just up to you to use them.
Bitwarden also lets you save locally stored files and manage them like KeePass, if you’re into that.
Honestly, since each can be made to more or less behave like the other, which one you pick largely comes down to taste. Bitwarden is more turn-key if you want cloud hosting, KeePass makes you work for it. Bitwarden is a company providing a premium service you can buy, while KeePass is a completely free project funded only by good will donations.
I prefer KeePassXC, personally.
I made a passphrase for my laptop in bitwarden and didn’t think I’d remember the 10 word passphrase but after a few days of typing it I now remember it. All other alphanumeric passwords I would need a keyboard in order to type it out if I remember
For my personal life I use a password manager, like most people in this thread. For my master password I really want a secure password (LastPass really reinforced the value of that), so I use a passphrase that is then hashed using an algorithm I can do in my head, so it’s a long string of high entropy alphanumeric gibberish that I can remember easily.
At work my IT dept seems to be stuck 10 years in the past, so they have now implemented a policy that our passwords must be at least 16 characters. They keep ignoring my suggestions to get some form of corporate password manager, so I have my work passwords stored in a text file that I’m not allowed to have any form of file encryption so it just sits there in my documents folder. It’s probably not going to be the source of our company getting penetrated, but I don’t consider it secure.
I do like pass phrases because I find them easy to remember, but my current prime work one is really easy to make typos, so I now use the reveal password button more than I ever have before.
At work, if you have the option, consider using KeePassXC or similar software. That will give you a properly encrypted file with secrets and also password-manager features.
I do. It’s worth it because there are some sites that are so outdated that their version of security is to not allow pasting (or filling in via pw manager) on password fields, so I have to manually type them in. Typing in a passphrase is easier and faster than a random string.
All my manual passwords are passphrases.
This is basically based on the idea that if the password is so strong I can no longer input it, it has no inherent value anyways. A phrase makes it easier to use entire sentences as a password and readily recall them.
Of course, these are but a minority, the rest are passkeys or passwords a manager will fill in.
I use passphrases for frequently used logins and randomly-generated passwords of varying lengths for everything else. I also use a hardware key and/or 2FA for everything that allows it.
I’m conversationally fluent in a few different languages (enough to order food, greet people and ask directions to the shitter, anyway) and I can swear in another half-dozen languages so I tend to mix’n’match my passphrases with different foreign words. Bonus points for accented characters. That’s probably not gonna fool a dictionary-based attack but since I live in a (mostly) English-speaking country, it might make it interesting for the English-only speakers to try guessing.
At work, we’re held to the outdated policy set by the IT department so it can be difficult to be creative. On top of that, they force a password change whenever someone sneezes so I see a lot of sticky notes on monitors and under keyboards.
Edit: spelling and grammar.
I once had to change a password every 30 days.
And it couldn’t be a password I’d used before. Along with ridiculous requirements (but not as ridiculous as the 30 day thing).
You’d think it was a password to get into the NSA’s database or something.
Nope, just a (not very) random website.
I do use passphrases, but I combine with randomness.
I memorize one random 8 character string to use with something more memorable.
Then when I need more security, or I feel that random 8 character string is no longer safe (password leak/hacked), I memorize a new 8 character string.
Then I combine them.
Then I memorize a new 8 character string and mix it in.
It’s a process built up over years that ingrains into memory. Sometimes I forget the order, or if i added spaces, or did no spaces. Luckily, as long as I am sure of the discrete segments, I can remix them to recreate until it works (in a reasonable time).
My last addition was when I made the move from Lastpass to another password manager, after their endless bad news.
https://bitwarden.com/password-strength/
Test it here. Passphrases of 3 words take centuries to crack, without any numbers or capital letters. Passwords with numbers, capital letters, and symbols need ~14 characters to be that secure. If you need to memorize it, a passphrase is far superior. Add in a number, or random capitalization, or a misspelling and your security goes even higher.
One caveat I’d want to note is for the underlying methodology that uses:
As this study by Joseph Bonneau attests, people frequently choose common phrases in addition to common words. zxcvbn would be better if it recognized “Harry Potter” as a common phrase, rather than a semi-common name and surname. Google’s n-gram corpus fits in a terabyte, and even a good bigram list is impractical to download browser-side, so this functionality would require server-side evaluation and infrastructure cost. Server-side evaluation would also allow a much larger single-word dictionary, such as Google’s unigram set.
As another example, the passphrase “This password is good” is claimed to take centuries to crack, but if the search space were narrowed down from a sequence of words to grammatically correct sentences, certain passphrases would be much weaker than this would show.
You should indeed use a password manager to randomize the generated password phrases. Bitwarden adds capitals, numbers and other characters to the password phrases.
Disk encryption, computer login, and password manager are pass phrase + random characters stored on a pin protected OnlyKey and/or Mooltipass.
Regular passwords are just random characters up to
min(max_len, 128).Use diceware to generate a nice long nonsense passphrase, and use that for your password manager master password. Keep it written down somewhere until you are sure you’ve memorized it.
Yes, on my password manager and computer logins. I love them because they are so easy to memorize and still secure enough to use in these scenarios. My Laptops are at home or with me. Someone cracking that is highly unlikely and I don’t want to look up and manually type random passwords from my PW manager every time. 1Password itself needs a second long password for new devices to login, so I’m not worried about that. Everything else has very long random passwords which I store in 1Password.
