Dial 00000000 To Blow Up the World

Charliemopps writes "For 20 years the password for the U.S. nuclear arsenal was '00000000.' Kennedy instituted a security system on all nuclear warheads to prevent them from being armed by someone unauthorized. It was called PAL, and promised to secure the entire US arsenal around the world. Unfortunately for Kennedy (and I guess, the whole world) U.S. military leadership was more concerned about delaying a launch than securing Armageddon. They technically obeyed the order but then set the password to 8 Zeros, or '00000000'."

Comments

00000000 just as secure as 73618357

[mowchine]

I saw some idiot claim that people just do not understand probability theory and state that in effect 00000000 is just as secure as 737474757. I would call him ignorant of hacking. What does one start with when cracking password protected systems? . . . a dictionary of common crap people use, like "000000000", "1111111111", "101010101010", "007007007007".

Re:Illusion shattered

[Anonymous Coward]

Off-topic, but note that playing an easily remembered set of numbers (not just 1-2-3-4-5-6, any set of numbers that you'll recognize) is bad for several reasons. One reason is that numbers which are special to you have a high probability of being special to someone else. The expected result of playing those numbers in a lottery is therefore lower than for other numbers. There are probably hundreds if not thousands of smartasses like your grandfather with whom he would have had to split the jackpot in case those numbers came up. Another important reason is that, however unlikely it is to have your special numbers come up, it is not impossible. When they do come up and just that time you didn't play, you'll kick your own arse for the rest of your life. This risk is a strong motivation to keep playing, which can lead to gambling addiction. So to lower your risk of getting addicted to gambling, don't ever bet on the same numbers.

Re:Illusion shattered

[hey!]

This is an example of "begging the question". "Randomness" is not a property of a number, it is a property of a sequence.

This sounds like splitting hairs, but it actually makes a lot of confusing things clearer if instead of asking "Is this number random?" you ask "Was this number produced by a process that generates a random sequence?"

Lets take the example of a combination. "0000000" is just as random as "3115435", but "0000000" was generated by a process which spits out easily keyed-in, easy-for-humans-to-remember numbers. In other words it's generated by a process that is biased towards spitting out numbers like "0000000" and "1234567".