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Entropy isn't sufficient to measure password strength

benwr.net

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Re: Entropy isn't sufficient to measure password strength

#81
post #31

Earlier quoted context omitted.

One could argue that you still need to remember your master password, and since it gives access to all your other passwords, it's all the more important to make it extremely strong. Therefore the randomness/memorability trade-off is still very important.

Yes, but it’s not too hard to make one ridiculously long/complicated master password that is also memorable. It might take you a while to remember it — just keep it written down on paper somewhere private & safe and refer to it as needed. If you’re not being targeted then you’ll probably be fine.

It doesn't need to be complicated. Just long.

ie

theuniverseis99%emptyspaceatleastthatswhatiwastaughtbymr.cattoningrade6

easy to remember without paper and uncrackable. Pair it with a yubikey and that's your bitwarden master

Re: Entropy isn't sufficient to measure password strength

#82

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replying to self... I guess it's not a useful measure of password strength, even if possible. Any password that doesn't repeat any letters will have identical entropy by this measure. So 123456789 will be the same Shannon entropy as Ar4e$hUa^

Entropy is really a measure of password length.

That's basically right for passwords.

Of course, if we impose password complexity requirements (e.g. must have a digit or an uppercase letter), it actually reduces the entropy in the password!

Re: Entropy isn't sufficient to measure password strength

#83
post #74
post #60

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> There’s also the possibility of mismanaging your password database and losing all of your data. The alternatives are same password everywhere or keeping a paper around with the passwords written in plain text. Both are equally disastrous (unless you work at home and don't ever get robbed)

Or finding a good mix between entropy and memorability so you can keep lots of strong passwords in your head, like the featured article discusses.

This doesn't work. If you have 100 different accounts, there is no way you can memorize around 5000 bits of entropy in a reasonable amount of time.

Re: Entropy isn't sufficient to measure password strength

#85
post #74

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Or finding a good mix between entropy and memorability so you can keep lots of strong passwords in your head, like the featured article discusses.

This doesn't work. If you have 100 different accounts, there is no way you can memorize around 5000 bits of entropy in a reasonable amount of time.

You don't need 50 unique bits of entropy for every one of those accounts. Memorize 10 25-bit passwords, for each account combine two of them, now you have 100 unique 50-bit passwords and you only need to remember 250 bits (technically 257 because you need to remember which combo goes with which), roughly the entropy of a long sentence. It might not be secure if someone has already hacked enough of your accounts to work out your pattern, but if you have dozens of accounts with different logins simultaneously compromised, that's on you.

I've got maybe 10 accounts that I really care about keeping secure - things like my bank and such where if someone got a hold of my account it would be a tough mess to sort out. Each of them has a unique password. But for most services I have login credentials for, I am not actually giving them any sensitive information. While I now use a password manager for these, before I just had a simple system for altering an otherwise standard set of passwords. It's not too hard to remember redd1t[standardsecurepassword], h@ckernews[standardsecurepassword], p0rnhub[standardsecurepassword], etc but as far as some random attack script is concerned these are all extremely unique and secure. If a human were specifically looking at it they could easily figure out the pattern and make some smart guesses, but even then I already give different emails to different accounts so I can tell who is selling my email addresses to spammers, and I had a few different secure passwords that I'd rotate, so only a tiny fraction would actually be in jeopardy. And again, there's nothing of value to be gained by hacking into these accounts. Overall I had maybe 15 genuinely unique passwords to remember, hardly a herculean feat. Now with the password manager, I still don't use it for my sensitive accounts, so I have like 8 passwords to remember; a relatively minor improvement.

Re: Entropy isn't sufficient to measure password strength

#86
post #43

Earlier quoted context omitted.

> That's not been true ever since the development of good password managers. A lot of people (do not trust password managers, case in point the recent last pass scare. You want passwords to your key accounts to be 1) memorable 2) strong 3) only in your head. For these, I think the article is fairly relevant.

> A lot of people (do not trust password managers, case in point the recent last pass scare. That's no excuse. KeePass allows having the database file locally where it's you duty to manage it. It might be less convenient, maybe. But I don't see valid excuses for people to not start using a password manager, even less the less tech savvy people.

Keeping a local database file secret is a pretty difficult task. You introduce a wider attack surface vs. a memory-based password.

Re: Entropy isn't sufficient to measure password strength

#87
post #4

Kolmogorov complexity/entropy is more suitable for this purpose, under the implicit assumption that password crackers don't have tailored prior knowledge and are just enumerating "simple" sequences. It only agrees with Shannon entropy on long ergodic sequences. The author basically constructed an example where the two notions don't agree.

The implicit assumption however isn't good. Password crackers regularly make use of prior knowledge. A password that consists of a Shakespearian Sonnet for example has very high complexity but makes for a bad password.

Re: Entropy isn't sufficient to measure password strength

#88

Earlier quoted context omitted.

Replying to self... I guess it's not a useful measure of password strength, even if possible. Any password that doesn't repeat any letters will have identical entropy by this measure. So 123456789 will be the same Shannon entropy as Ar4e$hUa^

Entropy is really a measure of password length.

Entropy is a measure of the potential state space. So password length matters a lot but so does the size of the character set.

Re: Entropy isn't sufficient to measure password strength

#89
post #23
post #18

When will we stop using passwords?! They are an elementary school kid “secret club” game taken way, way too far. They are totally broken. Nobody can come up with and remember good passwords. Nobody can store passwords securely. 100% busted. Instead of continuing to debate what makes a good password, we need to put our energy into better techniques altogether! No more shared secrets! Let’s talk about one-time codes, a…

In one of my current web-based projects I decided to experiment with magic links sent via email. They are pretty convenient (and secure enough) but turns out there's a problem with mobile email clients: they tend to open links in isolated embedded browsers and then forget the cookies. For most non-technical people this is a show stopper unfortunately. I then went with one-time 6-digit sign in codes that are emailed t…

I don't use a password manager and my email account is by far one of my most secure accounts so I actually love signing in to things like this. It beats having to remember another battery-horse-stapler type password. For more paranoid users you could add a 2FA option.

Re: Entropy isn't sufficient to measure password strength

#90
post #73

Earlier quoted context omitted.

I find this way less convienent because my password manager automatically fills in my username and password. So I can log in with 1 click. With "magic links" I need to enter my email (which may be autocompleted, but it is much less reliable) and then wait for the email to show up. (Assuming I have my email available.) Also email is never going to be reliably "instant" spam techniques include bouncing an email and wai…

I know but it comes at a price of some users who don't use a password manager setting silly weak passwords. In one of my mobile apps that manages KeyChain user/passwords correctly, I still see a lot of password reset requests. I can't even think of a reason why people would ignore autofill so often. The result is, although I haven't checked, but wouldn't be surprized if there were still a lot of "password123"'s in th…

Don't let the user set the password, just assign them something random. If you let users pick their own passwords some of them are guaranteed to pick insecure ones (i.e. anything which isn't random and unique to that site).

Though frankly we should be able to do far better than one-off shared secrets for each account. WebAuthn, for example, with the browser as the authenticator, protected by either a client-side master password or biometrics. That would be at least as good as a password stored in a password manager, with the advantage that the user doesn't need to store (and sync) unique passwords for every site. To log in from a new device just enroll a second authenticator.

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