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An Algorithm For Better Password Checking (technologyreview.com)
New submitter della writes: Password checkers — those things that tell you whether your password is strong or not — are good: various studies have found that they make users choose better passwords. Unfortunately, nowadays attackers use probabilistic strategies based on natural language processing to guess passwords earlier, and most checkers consist of heuristic rules that don't reflect well probabilistic attacks. To do better you could in theory simulate the attack, but if your password is not that bad, that would be very expensive or just unfeasible.
In a paper I wrote with Maurizio Filippone and presented at ACM's CCS conference, we show how you can take an attack model and a password, and through a simple formula come up quickly with a reliable estimation of how many guesses that attack would need to guess the password. You can use this to roll a better password checker, or — as we've also done in the paper — to compare different attacks.
In a paper I wrote with Maurizio Filippone and presented at ACM's CCS conference, we show how you can take an attack model and a password, and through a simple formula come up quickly with a reliable estimation of how many guesses that attack would need to guess the password. You can use this to roll a better password checker, or — as we've also done in the paper — to compare different attacks.
Stop saying my password is bad. If I make it more complicated, I won't remember it. So it would be even worse.
And making me change it every now and then is even more stupid.
I don't even care if they're secure or guessable or lexographic or written down or whatever other bullshit I'm supposed to care about.
I am sick of these bullshit passwords and signins fucking everywhere. Every single site, every single service, every single day, input this, email that, account name, please re-enter, confirm, mandatory, change must contain a two numbers, must contain capital letters, cannot contain special characters, forgotton your password?
I've given up. Fuck it. I'll just lurk, post anonymously while I still can. I must have over 200 accounts out there and I just don't care anymore. It's too much effort to remember all this bullshit anymore.
Lots of things really don't need highly secure passwords but insist on having ridiculous password requirements.
Case in point Xbox one must login to microsoft account to setup for the first time password must have at least one capital, at least one number, at least one symbol and at least 8 characters Password1~ is an acceptable password. Pita to type on xbox controller.
Netflix is a model for reasonable requirement's especially since it likes to log itself out at random. So less to type on wii remote is a definite plus. 4 letters minimum 0000 is an acceptable password.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
various studies have found that they make users choose better passwords.
By better do you mean harder for computers to guess or easier for users to remember and not have to write down?
>> Symbols appear to be less predictable and placed in different locations of the password
I disagree with the paper's conclusion based on the passwords I've seen, which FREQUENTLY just end in a "!" or other common character. Here's a different paper that goes into symbol frequency; I pulled out the relevant bit.
In almost all cases (90%), only a single special character was used. The most popular special character sequences were all single characters: exclamation point (“!” – 29%), period (“.” – 19%), “at” symbol (“@” – 15%) and hash (“#” – 14%). These were followed by the single dash (“-“), dollar sign (“$”), space (” “), asterisk (“*”), and plus sign (“+”), each making up between 3% and 6% of the single-character special character population. Passwords containing multiple special characters mainly (68%) just repeated the same special character, such as “##” or “???.” - http://resources.infosecinstit...
Stop making us change them every 3 months and we could come up with stronger passwords.
The only thing necessary for evil to triumph is for it to be pitted against a slightly greater evil
I use randomly generated passwords of lowercase letters and numbers. Most "password checkers" tell me they are insecure. This just shows how bad they are. Bit it is good that somebody did a systematic evaluation of the problem. Maybe now the stupidity will decrease.
Most ACs are not even worth the keystrokes to insult them. Be generically insulted by this and ignored otherwise.
Some sites have a horrible password schemas:
* Want to put in 16 characters for a password (think passphrase)? Nope, not allowed because some idiot thought you shouldn't be able to enter more then 8 chars.
* Enter in a password only to have it rejected? Tell us _which_ characters are allowed and which ones aren't !
Except that if your company has no password policy and a bunch of bad stuff is done with a user's account, you can't hold the user accountable, because you are not sure that they did it.... and they were just following policy.
Also there are pesky things like getting audited that come into play.
love is just extroverted narcissism
What's easier, teaching somebody who isn't tech savvy: A) how to use KeePass X or some other offline password manager; or B) to manually compose a bundle of strong, memorable passwords, to change them at least once a year, but not to re-use them, not to use them on any computer that could keylog them, and not to write them down or save them in plaintext?
The answer seems pretty obvious to me.
I'm a big fan of random phonetic passwords. The work well for my brain. Even a short base64 random letter password is harder for me to recall than a long phonetic password. Look at that co-author's butter tasting name " Maurizio Filippone". It's totally awesome to say that out loud. And do that 7 times right now and this evening you will still be able to say it. But you won't be able to recall 5(F{!X45*~d tonight. It's pretty easy to generate these where each phonem or di-phonem component has a very large library. I once wrote such a generator as a test and would just give people ten at a time to choose a password from. One person said it was a good way to choose baby names too.
A way I've experimented with password recovery is to generate a very long sentence I can remember and hash this to a random number seed. Then generate rememberable phonetic passwords in order starting from that seed, then pick one of the first hundred you are offered. If you need to recover your password later you just have it recreate the password list again from that sentence. Your brain can easily spot the password you picked the first time.
This latter test convinced me that phonetic passwords are easy to remember. If I had tried the same seeded passwrod generator on base64 passwords it less likely i'd spot my favorite in the mix.
Some drink at the fountain of knowledge. Others just gargle.
No, GP was correct. Written English is certainly a different set of registers from spoken English, but the original sentence is grammatical in neither. The original placement of "well" does not satisfy the correctness conditions of English syntax. It's not idiomatic. It's wrong.
Let's stop caring about password complexity! It is a losing game. Let's stick with simple passwords that are super easy to remember and type.
Security shouldn't be limited to a single factor. Two factor authentication is what we SHOULD be using. Something you know (the password), and something you have (some physical device). U2F is a damn perfect example of this. You can use your phone as an authenticator. You can add the authentication codes on multiple devices in case you lose the primary. These codes generate a time based sequence of numbers, so even if some MitM attach steals the entire login session details, it'll only be valid for at best ~1 minute.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/...
From the article:
Making a password longer or including symbols was much more effective.
Yet so many systems limit password lengths and forbid special characters. Example: My bank is one of the top 20 largest banks in the US, and they do not allow special characters in their web banking.
I don't understand why brute force attacks can't be stopped by limiting the number of failed attempts on any given account name and password. After x failures on either, don't accept another attempt for y minutes. It can't just be stupidity, so what am I missing?
This one was pretty funny; http://thedailywtf.com/article...
Protip flog is not a good password on a golf website.
Minimum threshold fixed. Thanks!
Fifty posts, didn't spot acronyms.
rrrybgdts
ttlshiwwya
ratrpfop
Nursery rhymes.
def IsPasswordHackable(password): return True
They make you choose passwords like JaNjwMownpJu81% which is pure crap, hard to remember, easy to bruteforce. Most sites won't let you use pass phrases, which are much more secure that those cryptic bullshit.
I haven't seen zxcvbn mentioned before, a similar look at password strength from 3 years ago.
https://blogs.dropbox.com/tech...
Demo is here: https://dl.dropboxusercontent....
Personally I like the output of http://www.kurtm.net/wpa-pskge... for passwords:
o|IRcWY;g_V]C}9'.@]@,]!YF.[Yj{K@QmuFCo%%!=~+ab,e2(pU97{V-)Qm*T
Do you have any better hostages?
Services should not care about whether or not my password is easy to guess (easy to remember). They should only care about making sure nobody can hack into their data center and steal EVERYONE'S passwords.
No, GP was correct. Written English is certainly a different set of registers from spoken English, but the original sentence is grammatical in neither. The original placement of "well" does not satisfy the correctness conditions of English syntax. It's not idiomatic. It's wrong.
I didn't well understand that.
I should use this sig to advertise my book ISBN-13 : 978-1501515132.
dammit. now I have to change my password.
Sleep your way to a whiter smile...date a dentist!
This is exactly what we need. An approach that tells users who strong their passwords actually are in real-life scenarios, and not how well they conform to some arbitrary policy.
The alternative, that's been used by some for more than a decade, is to run your own password cracker at night, and everyone whose password it cracks by morning is sent a mail telling them to change it.
We desperately need to get away from these awful policies that try to make passwords as random as possible for two reasons. One, they are a total failure, people are very inventice when it comes to finding a password that will satisfy the stupid computer but still be easy to remember (and guess). Two, if you make it complicated enough, people will just re-use and write down passwords more. Congratulations, one step forward, two steps back.
Assorted stuff I do sometimes: Lemuria.org
I think its cheaper to plug in a biometric scanner these days . Passwords are like the time when Stallman was at MIT.