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Correct Horse Battery Staple: Secure Password Generator

correcthorsebatterystaple.net

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Re: Correct Horse Battery Staple: Secure Password Generator

#41

But having a wordlist of ~2281 words means the search space is 2281^4 = 2.7e+13 which is less than an ascii password (roughly 100 usable ascii characters?) of length 7 i.e. 100^7 = 1e+14

1Password uses a Word List [1] of 18k words: 1.09e+17 which is more than an 8 character password from 100 usable characters.

Re: Correct Horse Battery Staple: Secure Password Generator

#42
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diceware is supposed to be done with Dice in an entirely offline manner. I guess a local program is still useful, but in theory the program could be a shoddy RNG with non-random passwords. The program shouldn't be trusted unless you wrote it yourself, or otherwise performed a security audit yourself. For all of its faults, 5x six-sided dice looking up this wordlist ( https://theworld.com/~reinhold/diceware.wordlist.a…

I feel like having words like "eee" and "eeee" or "g's" and "gs" on the list sort of defeats the point of "correct horse battery staple" - that the words are easily memorable and non ambiguous.

EEF’s is better.

https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-p...

Re: Correct Horse Battery Staple: Secure Password Generator

#43
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Diceware is supposed to be done with Dice in an entirely offline manner. I guess a local program is still useful, but in theory the program could be a shoddy RNG with non-random passwords. The program shouldn't be trusted unless you wrote it yourself, or otherwise performed a security audit yourself. For all of its faults, 5x six-sided dice looking up this wordlist ( https://theworld.com/~reinhold/diceware.wordlist.a…

I feel like having words like "eee" and "eeee" or "g's" and "gs" on the list sort of defeats the point of "correct horse battery staple" - that the words are easily memorable and non ambiguous.

I don't like the original diceware list. The EFF made a pretty good list though: https://www.eff.org/dice

Re: Correct Horse Battery Staple: Secure Password Generator

#44

But having a wordlist of ~2281 words means the search space is 2281^4 = 2.7e+13 which is less than an ascii password (roughly 100 usable ascii characters?) of length 7 i.e. 100^7 = 1e+14

I had a idea similar to this, where you would misspell one or two words randomly - and then generate a sentence below the password to help with remembering the built-in obfuscation. Such as the Generate Password would be listed as: > Correct Horce Battery Staple > "Correct Horse-with-a-C Battery Staple"

What’s the point? Obfuscation doesn’t increase entropy.

Re: Correct Horse Battery Staple: Secure Password Generator

#45

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a idea similar to this, where you would misspell one or two words randomly - and then generate a sentence below the password to help with remembering the built-in obfuscation. Such as the Generate Password would be listed as: > Correct Horce Battery Staple > "Correct Horse-with-a-C Battery Staple"

Why not just use "Correct Horse-with-a-C Battery Staple" as your password then?

My thought was that it would add some protection against a dictionary attack.

"Horse-with-a-C" is a longer password, but could possibly be hit using an algorithm that expects "with-a-[letter]" to be generated as part of a password.

The randomized misspelling of a word-or-two was intended to break a dictionary attack.

Re: Correct Horse Battery Staple: Secure Password Generator

#46

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I had a idea similar to this, where you would misspell one or two words randomly - and then generate a sentence below the password to help with remembering the built-in obfuscation. Such as the Generate Password would be listed as: > Correct Horce Battery Staple > "Correct Horse-with-a-C Battery Staple"

What’s the point? Obfuscation doesn’t increase entropy.

The obfuscation is to break a dictionary attack.

Re: Correct Horse Battery Staple: Secure Password Generator

#47
post #38

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I feel like having words like "eee" and "eeee" or "g's" and "gs" on the list sort of defeats the point of "correct horse battery staple" - that the words are easily memorable and non ambiguous.

EEF’s is better. https://www.eff.org/deeplinks/2016/07/new-wordlists-random-p...

https://pypi.org/project/xkcdpass/ this uses eff-long as the default (but also has other lists). It's available over pip and/or through most distro package managers.

Re: Correct Horse Battery Staple: Secure Password Generator

#48
post #9

There are a number of such generators, but this one has good defaults (with the number at the end). IMHO, it would be better if it would generate a list of passwords, so if the site is malicious, it wouldn't know which one you picked. It's weak, I know... But for this reason, I like this one: https://xkpasswd.net/s/

There's no way people actually use random websites to generate their passwords, right? Like, I can't just post or comment a password generator to a reasonably-tech-savvy forum like HN and have people actually use it to generate their next email password, can I? Surely there's at least some communal wisdom about how to correctly obtain software that you can reasonably trust with such an important task?

This is a fun project, and I respect implementing anything birthed from XKCD, but I agree and don't think I'd use this sort of thing to generate my passwords. ( Or I'll just stick to Password123 )

Re: Correct Horse Battery Staple: Secure Password Generator

#49
For those wondering, the source including word list is linked [1].

At a glance, the base dictionary is 2280 words; jargon is 8800; science is 575. So, definitely consider adding all the lists! That gives (check my math) ~13.5 bits entropy per word.

[1] https://bitbucket.org/jvdl/correcthorsebatterystaple/src/mas...

Re: Correct Horse Battery Staple: Secure Password Generator

#50
post #21

Promoting diceware is admirable, but I don't like the idea of trusting a remote website generator. A local diceware generator is probably available in your package manager, e.g: sudo apt install diceware diceware -n 6 QuickenPrisonThermosDefilingBasicsVengeful

Diceware is supposed to be done with Dice in an entirely offline manner. I guess a local program is still useful, but in theory the program could be a shoddy RNG with non-random passwords. The program shouldn't be trusted unless you wrote it yourself, or otherwise performed a security audit yourself. For all of its faults, 5x six-sided dice looking up this wordlist ( https://theworld.com/~reinhold/diceware.wordlist.a…

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