We should stop using the term "password" and start emphasizing passphrases. A full sentence is much easier to remember, yet harder to crack, than a shorter, cryptic password. Or, as XKCD put it: http://xkcd.com/936/
There's a widespread misconception that words are always bad because of dictionary attacks, but that concern is moot if you use unique words or simply use a long sentence. A major advantage of sentences is that, because they're memorable, you can more easily use a different password for every site.
We should stop using the term "password" and start emphasizing pass phrases . A full sentence is much easier to remember, yet harder to crack, than a shorter, cryptic password. Or, as XKCD put it: http://xkcd.com/936/ There's a widespread misconception that words are always bad because of dictionary attacks, but that concern is moot if you use unique words or simply use a long sentence. A major advantage of sentences…
I completely agree, but too many websites put upper limits on the password length (which is completely idiotic) to be able to do this in practice.
Wow, their advice is terrible too: "86% Exceptional" http://www.getsafeonline.org/themes/passwrdcheck/results.htm...
XKCDs correct horse battery staple earns merely 40% ("Warning: Your passwords are weak and your digital life is at risk!") http://www.getsafeonline.org/themes/passwrdcheck/results.htm...
Considering how they deduct points for "bad practices", and how avoiding those "bad practices" actually makes for a smaller password space, I have half a mind to spend some time figuring out exactly how much smaller the password space is for a given length if you follow all of their advice.
That's not quite right. Assuming you were picking passwords randomly discarding ones that have repeat letters etc makes for a smaller password space, certainly. However that's not how most passwords are generated, especially among the people that need this advice most. If your password generation algorithm is 'think out a random string' and produces 'aabbbbdccdc' then your password space is tiny. Those practices are…
For each rule in isolation, that's true enough. But the point stands: once you add together all those good practices (repetitions, consecutive letters, multiple character sets), how much does that actually reduce the password space? I'm not saying that the space becomes tiny, I'm saying that it becomes smaller, and I'm not sure whether "smaller" is still acceptably large, and it's an assumption that's worth checking.
Hahahahaha. This is a total embarrassment and it is why we can't have nice things. There is always this for a decent alternative: https://howsecureismypassword.net/
'abcdefghij' would take 9 hours to crack?
I thought they did a bloom search over the top 1000 most common passwords or something, I guess if you feel very strongly about this you could contact the creator :)
We should stop using the term "password" and start emphasizing pass phrases . A full sentence is much easier to remember, yet harder to crack, than a shorter, cryptic password. Or, as XKCD put it: http://xkcd.com/936/ There's a widespread misconception that words are always bad because of dictionary attacks, but that concern is moot if you use unique words or simply use a long sentence. A major advantage of sentences…
> but that concern is moot if you use unique words
You could say the same thing about passwords using random characters. The problem isn't getting people to remember them, it's getting people to use random passwords/unique words in the first place. Telling people to "use a long sentence" will just result in them picking common sentences most of the time like "To be or not to be" or "Live long and prosper".