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How Many Seconds Would It Take To Crack Your Password?
DillyTonto writes "Want to know how strong your password is? Count the number of characters and the type and calculate it yourself. Steve Gibson's Interactive Brute Force Password Search Space Calculator shows how dramatically the time-to-crack lengthens with every additional character in your password, especially if one of them is a symbol rather than a letter or number. Worst-case scenario with almost unlimited computing power for brute-forcing the decrypt: 6 alphanumeric characters takes 0.0000224 seconds to crack, 10 alpha/nums with a symbol takes 2.83 weeks."
I wonder if he's caching every string entered into a dictionary file...
That's silly. I just use my SS#. That has a LOT of digits. Who is going to guess that?
What kind of qualifier is that? If the computing power was "almost unlimited" you could crack any password you want since it is essentially unbounded in its parallelism. They are obviously making some concrete assumption about computing resources (which the article does not specify, as far as I can tell).
https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm
Whenever somebody mentions GRC I get a craving for cookies. Syncookies, to be precise..
http://xkcd.com/538/
There's still websites out there that limit you to 8 characters maximum. When Citi held my student loans (studentloans.com), their website would just use the first 8 characters of whatever password you entered.... of course, the field would accept more and they wouldn't tell you this so the first time you went to log in, it was a very WTF moment because you'd get a Password Incorrect error even though the password matched the one you signed up with. It was one of the main reasons I was actually happy when they sold my loan to Sallie Mae six months ago.
Anytime I read articles like this, I just assume someone is trying to see something...
The best way to limit an attack like this is to limit how fast the attempts can be made. Rerun his "test" when the server only allows one password submit ever 10 seconds and see how long it takes. More secure you say?? Well, after 5 bad attempts, lock the account for 30 minutes?? Please, however, never lock the account entirely like SOME companies do. That makes a script kiddies actions my problem...
Good passwords can never stop common sense computing procedures...
Not to be suspicious, but "doublecheck you password strength! Just enter your passwords below...." even from a relatively trusted source is a little tough to trust....
I use binary for passwords, thus my password is 168 character long, only down side is it only has 10 digits!
0111100101101111011101010010000001101
text in the middle
0010110111001110011011001010110111001
text in the middle
1100110 11010010111010001101001011101
text in the middle
100110010100100000011000110110110001
text in the middle
1011110110010000100001
More text because /. filter throws an error, I wonder how much more text I have to type?
"Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there."
"Filter error: That's an awful long string of letters there."
09 F9 11 02 9D 74 E3 5B D8 41 56 C5 63 56 88 C0
My password would take 8.52 hundred thousand centuries to crack in an Massive Cracking Array Scenario. Not bad. Add the fact that every password I have is different, I should be safe. An uppercase character added would take 1.41 hundred million centuries. Maybe it's time I put in an uppercase too :)
Can I light a sig ?
Too bad there are still so many services that will not allow special characters in a password during registration. I have to juggle 4 different types of passwords because of this retarded limitation. If you operate such a site/service, please fix it.
And raise you a xkcd 792
Sure, if you have some unknown password, and your brute strength computer can get a yes/no answer to each guess just as quickly as the guesses can be generated, then most passwords are shockingly insecure and can be cracked in fractions of a second. However, in many real-world situations, each guess has some minimum time or cost associated with it, which severely limits the real-world speed of a brute strength attack. For instance, if you are trying to guess the password to a WiFi network, each attempted connection takes several milliseconds at least, and multiple guesses can't happen simultaneously. What is more, there are also a large number of password-protected scenarios where too many failed attempts, or attempts that come in too-quick succession, result in being locked out.
So, yeah, a 6-character password may be crackable in 0.0000224 seconds - in an ideal, offline case backed by serious computing power. That might be the case of, say, the NSA trying to decrypt a copy of your hard-drive. In many real-world cases, these numbers are pretty meaningless except as relative measures of strength. But there have been good analytical tools for that since the days of Claude Shannon.
Thats where someone has already got a copy of the password protected item locally, for example, they have a password protected zip file which they can attempt to open repeatedly as fast as their own hardware can run.
These comments are my personal opinions and do not necessarily reflect the opinions of the other voices in my head.
What a great way to generate a new wordlist...
I worked on a random desktop rollout contract that was paying stupid amounts of money, and one evening I observed one of my fellow contractors entering his password.
clickity clickity clickity clickity...
I said "wow... hardcore password", he replied "yeah, I worked on a contract before this where we had to manually put in the MS Office CD Key across a few hundred desktops, so I've memorised it. It's now my go-to password"
Must have been the only time I've seen an MS CD-Key actually being wanted.
Pasting the first CD Key I could find on serials.ws (V4933-88FR7-9P3KK-D2QF4-9M9CM) into the GRC tool produced:
Online Attack Scenario:
(Assuming one thousand guesses per second) 68.45 thousand trillion trillion trillion centuries
Offline Fast Attack Scenario:
(Assuming one hundred billion guesses per second) 6.84 hundred million trillion trillion centuries
Massive Cracking Array Scenario:
(Assuming one hundred trillion guesses per second) 6.84 hundred thousand trillion trillion centuries
Anyway, in actual practice: passphrases using 2-3 words. I've found that 4 words and above is a bit much. And writing down your password/passphrase on a post-it is not a bad thing so long as your obfuscate it!
And moving from the "traditionally strong" password to employing XKCD's suggestions, I go from 2.29 Minutes on the "Massive Cracking Array Scenario" to 1.07 million trillion trillion trillion centuries.
I just have to hope that nobody comes around with a $5 wrench...
What system would allow someone to make thousands of attempts per second to login?
That's not the problem. The problem is that the lists of user logins and corresponding hashed passwords get in the wrong hands, whether it be due to bad design and/or coding, insecure software, or unfaithful servants. When you have that list, you run brute force against it to get the actual passwords.
Breaking into servers is much more attractive than breaking individual user accounts, simply because the yield is so much higher. Make a good trojan delivered through good social engineering, and you may catch 1% of the users. Breach the server, and you get the account info of all of them, and by running a crack session, you likely have 20-50% of the passwords within hours. Choose a very hard to crack password, and they may never get it even if they have the hash.
This happens a lot more than what we think. A server breach doesn't have to leave traces that anyone actually sees. We mostly know about the cases where the culprits brag about it or publish lists, which is unlikely to be more than the tip of the iceberg.
Companies are going to insist that their data is safe until proven otherwise, but you're stupid if you believe them.
Sony, Steam, LinkedIn, eHarmony - there are hundreds of server breaches with stolen user/hash lists that we know about. And likely an enormous amount we don't know about.
Soon we will see an article about how many hard passwords in recently leaked databases were "cracked" using this little test because users were gullible enough to test their real passwords...
"I love my job, but I hate talking to people like you" (Freddie Mercury)
I checked my password, and found that it will take 25.76 million trillion centuries. Hooray - no one that's never read XKCD will ever guess my password.
Obligatory: http://xkcd.com/936/
Take it to the limit, everybody to the limit, come on, everybody fhqwhgads.
https://xkcd.com/936/
I took the advice from XKCD and I now use nonsense pass-phrases, eg ''purple grass grows on my bedroom ceiling''. It is not too hard to remember, does not contain special characters (other than spaces) since they are hard to remember. grc.com says that that pass-phrase has a search space of 6.94 x 10^70 and that the Massive Cracking Array Scenario (one hundred trillion guesses per second) would take 2.21 hundred billion trillion trillion trillion centuries -- that is good enough for me.
You forget that if a procedure is too cumbersome for the users, it won't be used.
Same with a procedure that deviates so much from standard practice that what the users already know is wrong.
Your suggestion fails on both counts.
President Skroob: 1-2-3-4-5?
Colonel Sandurz: Yes!
President Skroob: That's amazing. I've got the same combination on my luggage.
The one for my email - trillions of years. Dumb sites emailing me my own private data means it needs to be secure.
Slashdot, football forums, BBC - minutes. I honestly don't give a shit about these sites.
Random websites that force you to sign up in order to download a crappy wav file - I'll just tell you, just to save you the hassle. username = no@example.com, password is nonononono.
My banking password? Minutes. Why? Because passwords are shite and obsolete. I use extra forms of authentication on banking websites.
This post contains benzene, nitrosamines, formaldehyde and hydrogen cyanide.
Q:So, from the answer above, that means that our passwords should always contain at least one of each type of character?
A:Yes, that's exactly what it means. Take, for example, the very weak password “news.” If another lowercase character was added to it (for example to form “newsy”), the total password search space is increased by 26 times. But if, instead, an exclamation point was added, (making it “news!”), the total search space is increased by a whopping 1,530 times! That's how important it is to choose passwords having at least one of every type of character. If anyone ever does try to crack your password, you will have eliminated all shorter searches.
Funny thing is, almost every example I've seen of how to increase the complexity of your password uses the example of putting an exclamation mark or a 1 on the end. Based on what I know about people, that's exactly what they'll do, which doesn't increase the search space by as much as the author thinks, and might even convince the user to use a shorter password with a ! on the end of it, which is worse.
Oops! *hurries to change password*
Slow down, cowboy! It has been 4 hours since you last posted. You must wait another few hours.
Well I entered in "Go to my office and look at the post-it on my terminal" and it said that will take "4.97 hundred billion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion centuries"
This article is misleading. Most sites will lock you out after so many failed attempts.
Trillions of centuries online, 65.90 thousand centuries with the Massive Cracking Array Scenario, and yet somehow I don't want to use it.
I wrote a nice long reply rebutting every single point then lost it when I hit backspace and focus was in the wrong part of the window. Grrr.
The author gets lots of things confused:
- He seems unaware that a rainbow table is equally effective against a good password as a bad one.
- He seems to think a dictionary attack comprises wholly and exclusively of words taken from a dictionary with no added numbers, symbols or punctuation. Bruce Schneier doesn't seem to agree with this, and I'm far more inclined to believe Mr. Schneier.
- He believes that a likely avenue for attack is constantly guessing a given user's password on a website. Any half-sane web service will block you long before you've tried a few thousand passwords against one username.
- He fails to note that in the case of LinkedIn, the list of password hashes itself was leaked - and this is Bad News.
- He also fails to note that in the case of LinkedIn, the password hashes were unsalted - Much Worse News.
- He also fails to note that if an unsalted list of password hashes is leaked, then it doesn't really matter how strong your password is, it's going to get found rather quickly. There's very little you or I can do about this. You could refuse to use systems that have such terrible security, but usually you only learn their security is this bad when it's far too late.
- He tops it off by recommending 10 character passwords with symbols and/or numbers. In other words, he falls foul of the problem described by Randall Munroe in XKCD some time ago.
Rainbow tables and Brute force could not do it in a reasonable amount of time. But this was a couple of years ago on a old decomissioned server with only 8 Xeon processors. 1 week later and still nothing.
Do not look at laser with remaining good eye.
Obviously, it would be S T U P I D to enter your password there.
According to the site
test would take 7.92 minutes to crack,
password would take 6.91 years,
abcd123 would take 2.56 years and
correct horse battery staple would take 12.41 trillion trillion trillion centuries.
Quite interesting.
let's say you know 100% for sure that somebody is using xkcd's method.
there are 15,222 words in the english language according to oxford english dictionary. how many are common 5, 6, and 7 letter words? hard to say for sure. I think 3000 or 4000 would be a good conservative guess, what do you think? let's say 3000 to err on the side of caution.
how many combinations of common 5,6, and 7 letter words does that give us to build a password based on xkcd's suggestion?
3000^4
that's 8.1 x 10^13 discrete combinations, counting the ability to reuse the same word.
I'm asuming you didn't build a plaintext dictionary with all those possible combinations... at 1 byte per letter, and an average of 6 bytes per component word, that's 4.86 x 10^14 bytes, or a 442 terrabyte dictionary file. where the hell are you storing that?
no, i'm assuming you probably built a program specifically to build combinations of component words and brute force using that. sure that will eventually work, after it goes through its 8.1 x 10^13 itterartions (worst case)... but hell, why are you trying to crack that hard a password when there are thousands out people out there whose password is just "Password1"? the club doesn't make your car theftproof, it just makes it less inviting to the thief than the car next to it. you don't need to outrun the lion, you just need to outrun the slowest person in your group.
and this is all assuming:
1. you somehow -know- which password generation method the person is using
2. they didn't do what I do with that method, and throw a few uppercase and numbers in there anyway.
Nice post. Too bad I used my last mod points yesterday.
The most ridiculously strong password is 100% worthless if your online data (via the server itself) is compromised, which happens way more than we'll ever know about.
Even more creepy are the perfectly legal and "legit" uses of your data (make sure you read everything in the EULA I guess) that are knowingly and willingly handed off to various third parties.
"Beware of bugs in the above code; I have only proved it correct, not tried it." -- Donald Knuth
This tool calculates the brute-force time on a character basis. It says that dictionary attacks still work and should be mitigated by policy and practice.
You do not have a moral or legal right to do absolutely anything you want.
I am /supposed/ to hold the shift key while typing numbers on my french keyboard you insensitive clod !
Very nice, MD5 hashes can be cracked quickly in massive parallel on GPU hardware. This only matters after the hashes have already been stolen.
Actual security should be more systemic -- the cost of a wrong guess is more than a nanosecond of GPU. There are at least network delays, and in many cases lockouts. The latter make random guessing too costly/slow, especially progressive systems that allow 5 wrongs immediately, 10 in an hour, 20 in a day, and lock hard (manual intervention) above that.
My father had one of the early ATM cards but had me operate the machinery. It had an 8 digit assigned PIN, but dropped quickly to 4 when it was realized the 8 were hard to remember, and swallowing the card after 3 wrong guesses was more than adequate.
Obligatory xkcd
correcthorsebatterystapler
Search Space Depth (Alphabet): 26
Search Space Length (Characters): 26 characters
Exact Search Space Size (Count):
(count of all possible passwords
with this alphabet size and up
to this password's length) 6,
402,364,363,415,443,603,
228,541,259,936,211,926
Search Space Size (as a power of 10): 6.40 x 1036
Time Required to Exhaustively Search this Password's Space:
Online Attack Scenario:
(Assuming one thousand guesses per second) 2.04 trillion trillion centuries
Offline Fast Attack Scenario:
(Assuming one hundred billion guesses per second) 20.36 thousand trillion centuries
Massive Cracking Array Scenario:
(Assuming one hundred trillion guesses per second) 20.36 trillion centuries
--
BMO
And only got the response: "That's the kinda thing an idiot would have on his luggage."
It actually is stronger. Dictionary attack for single words pass is effective, but for 3+ words it is not, and if you add word separators like you have, it's even stronger.
Also, oblig. xkcd: http://xkcd.com/936/
The Zeitgeist Movement
The problem about those hash functions is that you're never going to get the password guess rate as suggested by the article on modern hardware. After all for every single password the hash has to be calculated.
You can create a dictionary for that of course, and that way you will have many many passwords in a very short time. But add a little randomness to your password and very good chance you're out of the dictionary table and that your password is practically unguessable.
Break into a server, get a million usernames+hashes, and seconds later you have done your dictionary attack and have maybe 40% of the passwords in your hands. I'd say that for most purposes of the attacker that's good enough (assuming they're not targeting a specific account).
So your super-duper trillion-century password should work great until someone runs an injection attack and downloads the website's plain-text password database
If I had to do that shit every time I sat down at my laptop (which I lock every time I get up, which happens a lot), I'd fucking kill myself. it's already annoying enough having to type in my 22 character password every time I sit down.
hell we're only a few years away from real-time retina and dna scanners anyway, at which point passwords will be obsolete... at least, that's what gattaca told me.
You can make enourmous gains just throwing 2+ words that makes somehow sense to you (there must be a way to remember them after all), and a single generated word with random alpha-capital-sign-numeric but which doesn't have to be big. Like 4-6 character. That way, there's absolutely no use of dictionary attacks what so ever.
Doesn't just *allowing* the use of numbers and special characters automatically increase the search space size, regardless of whether the user takes advantage of them? It's the fact that cracking systems will focus on all letters first which makes them weaker, right?
Your favorite sig sucks
If your password is subject to.more than one guess per second the system is already pwned. The most important thing is not to have super secure passwords but to protect the system so the crackers can't get access to the hash files in the first place. If the crackers have your hash files, what else do they have?
https://xkcd.com/936/
I took the advice from XKCD and I now use nonsense pass-phrases, eg ''purple grass grows on my bedroom ceiling''. It is not too hard to remember, does not contain special characters (other than spaces) since they are hard to remember.
Do you find a lot of services and websites will accept long plain text passwords like that?
When our name is on the back of your car, we're behind you all the way!
I'm not a programmer so this may be a dumb question, but do cracking programs somehow go around the normal web interfaces we all usually have to use? Because many that I use only allow a certain number of tries or the refresh time after each unsuccessful attempt is not instant. Sure if you put the program in a standalone it could do the cracking fairly quickly but that's not always real world is it unless you have some direct access to the server?
But that's an overestimate. Your words form a sentence with.proper grammar so you shouldn't really found each word as 10 bits. Has anybody studied the average entropy of sentences?
dictionary will take an infinite amount of years if you employ pass-phrases correctly.
But if the password file is offline, your unencrypted data may be as well.
What system would allow someone to make thousands of attempts per second to login?
That's not the problem. The problem is that the lists of user logins and corresponding hashed passwords get in the wrong hands, whether it be due to bad design and/or coding, insecure software, or unfaithful servants. When you have that list, you run brute force against it to get the actual passwords.
And even that isn't the "real" problem, so much as the dependency on passwords, and for that matter, the dependency on passwords that are generated by non-security experts that are mostly out of control of the entity/service trying to secure them. When a user gets to pick their password, which is probably the only way one can be generated that the user can remember, he or she is creating a password to prevent people from doing just what the OP suggested: breaking into his/her yahoo/linkedin/facebook/etc. account. The user is not creating a password for the purposes of making the service's password table harder to crack should it leak out. The user is probably unaware of this kind of attack, and really ins't qualified to defend against it anyway, being almost certainly out of his or her area of expertise.
When a bank rents you a safe deposit box, they don't depend on you to build your own lock and key.
I don't have a good solution to the problem, but I do think that we're trying to solve the wrong one.
I am not a crackpot.
I'm irked to no end by articles that suggest the use of impossibly long to remember passwords. Can we please be told to use pass phrases instead?
Much about everyone knows witty quotes, religious quotes, song lyrics, movie lines, etc. Surely they can successfully use these as pass phrases? Good luck brute forcing something like this:
Proverbs 21:19 -- It is better to live alone in the desert than with a crabby, complaining wife.
Massive Cracking Array Scenario:
(Assuming one hundred trillion guesses per second) 23.36 billion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion trillion centuries
Soooooo....enter your password into this completely legitimate and not-at-all-a-harvesting-tool password checker and we'll tell you if it's secure?
Ima get right on that.
"Tell me doctor, with all of your defenses, are there any provisions for an attack by killer bees?"
Your password doesn't meet the security rules. It must be at least 8 characters long and contain at least one number and one uppercase letter. Please use letters and numbers only.
It's actually a great prank by a French Grande Ecole.
Here's what you get when you enter one:
Security assessment for password "Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM"
Thanks for disclosing password "Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM" to us!
Password Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM
Score
0 % - Insecure
Assessment
You just disclosed password "Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM" to an untrusted third party (us). You have no way to find out what we intend to do with it. Maybe we logged it and intend to publish it or to use it against you? For this reason, password "Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM" is now compromised. It is therefore insecure and should not be used in any situation.
Suggestions
Do not disclose your passwords to any untrusted third party for any reason.
If you are actually using password "Parse error: syntax error, unexpected T_PAAMAYIM_NEKUDOTAYIM", stop using it and change it immediately.
Change any other password you may have compromised in this way before you used the Estatis Password Security Checker.
Man, Gibson has completely lost it--and it was always a bit dubious if he ever had it to begin with.
I'm sure the NSA has a very complex model of password structure based on every password they have every captured or broken. They would certainly try longer passwords with high symbol repetition rates before shorter passwords with uniform distribution over large symbol sets.
The correct asymptotic answer involves Kolmogorov complexity theory: what's the shortest program (on a chosen universal computer) which prints out each of those strings? Hint: the program that prints out d0g................. is probably not a long one.
But wait ... you first seed the machine with every password known to the NSA that has ever been cracked or stolen. This does not count as part of the program length. Now test the passwords in roughly the same order as the associated minimal generating program. This isn't tractable, but even a ham-fisted approximation is less stupid than Gibson's assumptions.
More to the point, non-uniform scheduling is not the most trivial coding challenge in the massively parallel implementation.
But then if he had the wits to also print out the answers in joules and not just years he would realize that the economics quickly tips to favour investing in a distributed password cracking scheduling algorithm on the order of the complexity of a 3000+ computer chess engine or 6-man EGTB generator.
Only counting words that are entirely lower case my /usr/share/dict/words has 355543 lines which is some 19 bits. However: I would not know most of them. Estimates on vocabulary size are ''10,000-12,000 words for a 16-year-old, and 20,000-25,000 for a college graduate''. Lets be a pessimist and take 10,000 words. Ignoring the small words my phrase contained 5 words, so the number of permutations is about 10,000^5 which is about 10^21 combinations.
Using their Massive Cracking of 10^14 guesses/second - my pass phrase would take some 10^6 seconds or 11 days to crack. Not many organisations have the computational hardware for Massive Cracking, so I am probably reasonably save from all except CIA/GCHQ - and they would probably get me by other ways.
Can anyone give a better estimate ?
that's why i also use it on my luggage.
with almost unlimited computing power for brute-forcing the decryptt: 6 alphanumeric characters takes 0.0000224 seconds
With "almost unlimited" computing power any password will almost take "almost no time" to decrypt.
sic transit gloria mundi
Seriously, any system that allows 1000's or millions of attempts to access the same account repeatedly with failing passwords is an inherently flawed system.
I don't like systems that give you 3 attempts and then lock you out, that is unnecessary, but an secure system should expect that "human" entered password will take at least 10 + seconds between attempts and that no "human" would spend several hours/days trying to enter repeatedly failing passwords.
There is a current "myth" that I am required to change my passwords frequently and use stupid rules to construct a password. I think the systems need to change to understand the fundamental difference between human input and computer generated input and then deal with the attack accordingly.
I also read somewhere that using 4 REAL randomly associated words is far more secure then some password full of symbols, characters and digits.
I think password systems need to change, not the way people pick a password, I can't believe any system should exist that allows brute force hacking schemes.
I haven't thought of anything clever to put here, but then again most of you haven't either.
There's a fundamental error in how steve's doing this. It assumes either the attacker knows the key space you're using or searches all smaller key spaces first. Instead, an attacker is more likely to use a word list with a set of permutations. that may mean that Password1! breaks even though it has a nice key space. On the other hand, passssword may not break because it's simply too computation intensive to check adding the entire key space into the middle of the dictionary in every location. You'd have to search every number, letter (upper/lower), and character inbetween every other letter in the word and then do it again with combinations of two characters for every word in your dictionary. (BTW, I can't take credit for this insight. It was presented at defcon a few years ago. As a sidenote, at the presentation, I believe someone indicated some password crackers will try characters inbetween the sylables. To generalize this, you can use a pattern to create your password with a very small keyspace and unless the pattern and keyspace is known to your attacker (either because you leaked it or you chose a common pattern) your password can be safe.
I do security
I have to wonder why anyone listens to Steve Gibson about anything, ever. He goes back a long way, making sweeping claims about things he kind of understands based on research done by actual security professionals. Has he gotten better at things in the last decade or so? He always had a tendency to hear something, run off on a tangent creating press releases and small tools, and then get shouted down by the security community at large. Examples including who did the heavy lifting: Raw Sockets (l0pht/@stake IIRC [and whoever the initial researcher was, they did NOT spin it as the apocalypse, as Gibson did), WMF (Ilfak Guilfanov), SYN Cookies (djb), DNS (Dan Kaminsky), and this article right here.
Slashdot always seems to be his willing dupe and publicizes whatever he is concerned with at the moment.
I like music
That's not the problem. The problem is that the lists of user logins and corresponding hashed passwords get in the wrong hands, whether it be due to bad design and/or coding, insecure software, or unfaithful servants. When you have that list, you run brute force against it to get the actual passwords.
I suspect that if you have that list, then the individual users logins and passwords are of no use to you. Unless of course you have acquired that list secondhand.
If you are not allowed to question your government then the government has answered your question.
Apparently Steve and I share the same taste in food, if not passwords. The pic being taken at Rudy's Can't Fail Cafe in Oakland CA who make a mean Guinness milkshake, yum. Highly recommended to those in the area.
Thank you.
Addendum:
Not only would the NSA have such a model, but it would be conditioned on any number of details they might know about you: your nationality, ethnic background, date of birth, education, profession, operating system, and keyboard skills. Factors of ten are worth having.
Worse, if they've siphoned many of your other passwords over the intertubes--perhaps passwords you don't actually care much about--they would still attempt to detect structural patterns to bias the password search order for more complex passwords you do care about. Ideally there's a sharp schema discontinuity.
I pretty much use apg on my OpenBSD box for any password I care about (an uncompromised entropy source and RNG also matters). As a compromise, I've set apg to generate what I would estimate as about 60 bits per password, then I filter and discard the ugliest ones, shaving a few bits to finger compatibility. With this practice, after conditioning my profile on quasi-elite best practice, cross entropy won't provide much additional boon.
Password inflation runs about ten bits per decade, while my brain deflates about three bits per decade. The center cannot hold. Already I can barely hold in mind my semi-mnemonic apg-generated 60-bit passwords long enough to use them twice.
using xkcdpasswordmethod I get 97.49 centuries on the Massive Cracking Array Scenario.
Interestingly, MassiveCrackingArrayScenario yields 2.89 hundred million trillion trillion centuries
You password is only as good as the system recording it. You could have a 30 character complex password and if the site can be comprised by a simple SQL injection and stored in plain text then it really doesn't matter now does it? All this shenanigans lately around password hash files and security needs to be put back on the providers.
is: "What 1s Th3 p4ssw0rd Tod@y"
The spaces are in there. And no it is not on any important system or account. I use it if I set up a test system for a while (a week or two at most) that I have to share with other people. Everyone can remember that password. The funny thing was we had a company come in to test out security. They did not get that password after trying for a 24/7 for a week.
My personal favourite is to translate some of the words into random languages after I have made the passphrase. It's not difficult to learn a few foreign words, but since the attacker doesn't know which languages you used he gets the fun task of trying ALL languages that use the latin script. Since there is more than 100 languages using latin characters in the world, even a moderate dictionary size of 10000 or so would give you a total of more than a million words, resulting in the generated passphrase having in excess of 10^24 possible combinations. If the attacker can try a billion passphrases per second, it would take 31.7 million years to try them all.
Assuming near omnipotence I can travel around the world in .000034 seconds, lift 12,232,235,656 pounds, and come up with the most pointless slashdot article all at once. Thoughts?
there are 15,222 words in the english language according to oxford english dictionary.
This is off by more than an order of magnitude: the Oxford English Dictionary claims it has 171,476 words in it and point out that this is an underestimate of how many base words are in the English language -- probably more like 250,000 -- and that doesn't begin to cover compound or specialist words.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
But, IMHO, not too much, statistically.
I expect most of the people putting the mandatory uppercase letter at the beginning of the pass and the mandatory number (usually a '1') at the end.
my source was apparently flawed as all hell then.
Nope, and my attempt to use even just four reasonable length words (the 5 to 7 letter each ones) on my Battle.net account failed. I ended up having to drop it down to three, so I threw in a single letter substitution and then activated two-factor authentication on my account.
A password I just randomly chose (1mg0nn@fuckyourm0m) would take roughly 4 billion centuries to crack.
Sometimes childish 1337$p3@k is fucking awesome.
Still waiting on Serviscope_minor to wake up to fucking reality and realize that Jessica Price isn't going to fuck him.
Hats off to the venerable Steve Gibson for an excellent teaching aid. If nothing else he presents an interactive tool that begins to highlight how stoopid your pet's name, spouse's birthday, or favorite song title is. For most folks, current company excepted, trying to explain how to measure number space for a given password length & character set is a useless exercise. That said, the Password Haystack motivated me to harden my passwords. 1.65 hundred centuries using a Massive Cracking Array Scenario works for me. Can you say "Bluffdale 84065"?
statistically you can work out the probability for each of N capital letters. Let us assume that because this article and several others like it, are only suggesting that people add a single capital letter. then the search space doesn't really get bigger. for a 10 character password it is only a single order of magnitude. For a 30 second search on an all lower-case it takes 5 minutes for one known to have one upper case. Helpful, but not really all that impressive.
likely the attack will just search most likely to least likely. so: dictionary words, random lower, 1 upper, 1 number, 1 symbol, lower + upper + numbers
as you add together the time it approaches the worse case search through the entire space.
the tool 'pwgen' produces pretty good passwords, numbers and upper. but it does pick them out in a certain way, so if you knew people were using pwgen for their passwords (that's unlikely to happen) you could dramatically reduce the search space despite the program's "strong" passwords they are selected according to some criteria to make them easier for a human to memorize. example passwords:
Quob5foh Theeji6c OhGhie2E xi0omiNg oGhai6bu uB9Caisi Thahvei0 Iecohl8z
weiGh3ie LahGoh3t uR3SaiJa ie0ja2Ah doS1looh Oa1maiph dei6OhQu AeNei8Ch
“Common sense is not so common.” — Voltaire
Any LiveCD with chntpasswd(8) should do the trick. Choose one that only gives you a command line (Trinity, IIRC) and memory won't be a problem.
If I mod you up, it doesn't necessarily mean I agree with what you've said, sorry.
Dumb theory. In the real world the cracker has to wait for a response from the system. If the cracker tries too many times, too fast or such then the system just locks the cracker's IP out and if this keeps happening locks the account out for a timeout. This makes it take centuries instead of seconds.
would take:
Online Attack Scenario:
(Assuming one thousand guesses per second) 14.14 million trillion centuries
Offline Fast Attack Scenario:
(Assuming one hundred billion guesses per second) 1.41 hundred billion centuries
Massive Cracking Array Scenario:
(Assuming one hundred trillion guesses per second) 1.41 hundred million centuries
same number of characters, same number and organization of numbers and letter. Just different numbers and letters.
The Kruger Dunning explains most post on
http://img705.imageshack.us/img705/6066/passwordo.jpg
against a remote site doesn't any decent site usually lock an account after 3 - 5 attempts
I don't bank online, I don't do anything particularly secure online, and I don't really care who accesses my accounts. My password has been the same for the better part of a decade, and with the exception of my email, everything I use has pretty much the same password.
My password is supposedly trivial to crack. It is an 8-digit dictionary word, all lowercase. No numbers, no symbols, simple.
According to this utility, your average Anonymous script kiddie would still take 6.97 years to crack it.
Well call me unworried.
If the only way you can accept an assertion is by faith, then you are conceding that it can't be taken on its own merits
I'm not sure this would work from the perspective of intentionally including it; but I think it would be an interesting way to "flag" accounts for extra verification. People have different typing styles and your natural timing of entry for a password should be computable from logins over time. If the entry is significantly off it can be a yellow flag to indicate that maybe it isn't you entering the password. Combine that with some other factors (e.g. IP history, user agent strings) and you could perhaps identify accounts that are likely compromised and require an extra verification step.
I don't really have time to work this out and try it, but it'd be very interesting to try.
I am unsure where you heard that there are only 15,222 words in the English language but I just checked the OED website and they say it's closer to 170,000 words. http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/how-many-words-are-there-in-the-english-language
But the idea is valid if you include easy to remember made-up words and proper nouns and such. If you include uppercase at the beginnings of words and include spaces, then you've really given the rainbow table generator guy a run for his money.
I am glad that you didn't fall into the trap that people do and then say OMG, YOU USED REAL WORDS!!!@#!@$#!!ONE!!1 and then assume that partial passwords are recoverable and you only need to test for one word. Which, is not how it works. I've run into that argument time and again and I don't know where people get the idea.
If you also read further, he goes on to say that the length of a password is really important, and gives two examples: one that looks easy to crack, and one that looks secure, but the one that looks easy isn't the easy one, because it has all elements of a "secure" password and is longer (more bits to run through the crack) that the "difficult" one. And once you make the person running the crack have to guess how long the password is, you've probably already won.
I just wanted to run the xkcd password through to see what I'd get. I'm sure the xkcd password is part of everyone's dictionary by now and is useless as an actual password.
A secure password doesn't have to look like an already hashed password.
As for a source of words not found in typical dictionary files that will give squiggly lines everywhere when used in documents, go to the Phrontistery.info, which on my screen is squiggly-lined.
>. With four words, that's 44 bits total as their entropy is multiplied together.
Order matters, it's not just multiplication. 11 bits ^4
http://www.mathsisfun.com/combinatorics/combinations-permutations-calculator.html
Screenshot: 2000 words, 4 of each, order matters, repetition ok: http://imgur.com/0n5XL
--
BMO
My /usr/share/dict/words has:
:-).
235924 words in total,
10231 5 letter words
17707 6 letter words
23880 7 letter words
in the english language.
I'd say that your estimates are indeed very conservative
It took us two tries to crack an iPhone.
1234
chicks birthday. (may have done DD/MM and MM/YY can't remember)
I guess what I am trying to say, is the the amount of time it takes is directly proportional to the information I know about you. Which given social media, and the like is a lot.
Thinking some evil empire is going to "brute force" your 2048 bit encrypted pass phrase is stupid. It is more likely going to be some jerk that either phishes it, spoofs it, keylogs it, social engineers, etc... whereby basically it takes zero seconds to crack your code, because you just gave it to someone willingly.
This isn't some Russian hacker with a nuclear powered pentium 5 linux RISC chip out to crack your codes. Much more likely, no codes will be broken, a security vulnerability will be taken advantage of giving access to yours and 2.2 million other passwords.
People need to get their perspective corrected.
I decided to test this method against the GRC tester and it was flawless. Try it for yourself --choose 4 RANDOM words 5 characters in length. Works amazingly well. Avoiding popular phrases (common sense; no bible verse, songs, book or movie quotes, etc...) and meaningful groupings (seveneighttwelve) goes a helluva long way to making a very secure passphrase.
Except... And this is the problem...
Popular "security best practices" SPECIFICALLY prevent you from using, what would otherwise be, a secure password.
They always want mixed case alphanumeric at minimum. And, a significant number of websites have maximum length limits too.
Hrmmm, I wonder if "they" purposely choose the illusion of security because they know that "we" are stupid and lazy...*
"They" and "we" in no way represent any person or entity, living or dead...yadda yadda yadda, blah blah blah...
"Helping to keep you two steps ahead of the Thought Police!"
>I'm not sure what you're correcting me about here since multiplying 2^11 * 2^11 * 2^11 * 2^11 = (2^11)^4, which is how you do a permutation that allows repetition. The math words out the same, and your result using 2000 instead of 2048, works out to 43.8 bits of entropy (which rounds up to 44). (No offense taken, though.)
Meh. Need coffee.
I used 2000 words because of what you started with. If we're going to start in Decimal, we may as well stay in Decimal for the calculation and stay away from converting to different bases. KISS.
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BMO
The big gain in entropy when using multiple words is from password length. Having symbols, case changes and unusual characters all increase entropy but over a certain length there are just to many combinations of lower case letters for brute force to be effective. Why complicate it further and risk slower typing speed/mistyping?
To follow up on my message,
I think that 2000 common words is unrealistically too small a vocabulary for everyday use.
It's probably on the order of 10,000 in daily use by joe schmoe.
- http://oxforddictionaries.com/words/how-many-words-are-there-in-the-english-language
and....
- wikipedia.
What does this mean?
IMO, predicting what people are going to use for their correcthorsebatterystapler passwords is nigh impossible and to crack the password of someone who is evenly slightly motivated to have a non-weak one will probably require heat-death of the universe time to crack with a distributed crack. There will always those who use "it's just the letter A" but there is no cure for stupidity.
"It's just the letter A" http://www.youtube.com/watch?feature=player_detailpage&v=uRGljemfwUE#t=399s
YMMV of course.
--
BMO
Your source was probably listing the average working vocabulary of people: 10,000-20,000 words is a fairly typical working vocabulary. People who worry about such things usually claim that English has significantly more words in it than any other language, estimates ranging up to a million words, while many other languages have estimates closer to 100,000 words. (If the people talking about it can stop arguing about what counts as a word for long enough to agree on something: German mashes together nouns into single words; Mohican can jam the subject, the object, the verb, the tense, and a declination all into a single word.) Within the context of this discussion, people are only going to use words from their working vocabularies or maybe a little bit more -- it's likely most people recognize the word susurration and might use it as an obscure password, but would never use it in speech or writing otherwise -- but someone trying to brute-force a password would have a lousy return on investment in trying to decide what a core 15,000 word vocabularly would be, to only use those words in the brute-force attempt.
Nostalgia's not what it used to be.
and Behold the Mystical Power of EXPONENTS!! Prepare to be amazed!! We will magically create numbers so big they are Unimaginable!!
Light cup, beer drink, thin so chain, neck turtle fat, man I won't say it again
If you disable an account after failed attempts, you get three tries.
If you disable an account for an hour after failed attempts- and alert the owner, you may get 9 tries.
She was like chocolate when she drank... semi-sweet at first and then increasingly bitter.
That would be how many words you know. I think the more relevant number is the number of words that people use in speech. Almost all the words that would be used in plain text (xkcd-style) passwords would be drawn from the much smaller set that most people use every day. "head" is more likely to be used than any of its synonyms
And, a significant number of websites have maximum length limits too.
Sites and services that artificially limit the character set and length of passwords annoy the hell out of me.
on a passphrase of 63 characters, through a triple cascade encryption?
Obviously, this is an offline setup.
Operation Guillotine is in effect.
The first digit identified the type of industry as is shown if you go here ->>>> http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bank_card_number
If you could just read your own damn link:
MasterCard 51-55
Visa 4
It's right there in the table.
Yes, I know about the industry types. The vast majority of commonly used credit cards are issued by the banking industry, with the first digit being either 4 or 5, so I didn't bother mentioning the other less common starting digits. More specifically, the vast majority of commonly used credit cards are either Visa (starting with a 4) or MasterCard (starting with a 5).
or six minutes... wow that was helpful.
10 characters with a symbol: Possible combinations: 171.3 sextillion (171,269,557,687,901,638,419; 1.71 x 1020)
Sure enough, the cow costume was hanging up next to the superhero outfit and sailors uniform. (S,Spud)
Shouldn't any reasonable calculation that attempts to illustrate password strength beyond a year take in to account the increasing compute power of the past 30 years or so?
This tool calculates the brute-force time on a character basis. It says that dictionary attacks still work and should be mitigated by policy and practice.
What it doesn't emphasise is that there is a world between the "dumb dictionary attack" (try all words in a dictionary) and the "dumb brute force attack" (try all combinations of characters in an alphabet). That world is what a smart attacker will inhabit.
Something like "Mother!fucker" would't be cracked by either the "dumb dictionary attack" and the "dumb brute force attack" but that does not mean it is a strong password.
note: i'm known as plugwash most places but i screwd up registering that here somehow in the past and now can't register