this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
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Security expert reveals surprising way to make your password stronger: use emojis (nypost.com)
submitted 1 year ago by Salamendacious@lemmy.world to c/technology@lemmy.world
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[–] ammonium@lemmy.world 10 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Four words is too low these days to protect against gpu bruteforcing

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (1 children)

Got a source on that?

Edit: plus brute forcing is just one scenario. I think the xkcd comic refers to using passwords in online services, and those usually have some sort of rate limiting.

[–] ammonium@lemmy.world 8 points 1 year ago (1 children)

https://thesecurityfactory.be/password-cracking-speed/

8 character a-zA-Z is 45 bits of entropy (log2(56^8), about the same as the XKCD password if you take from a 2048 word list. That's crackable in a minute on AWS.

Password hashes get frequently stolen, don't rely on rate limiting if it's something you really care about.

Here are the dice ware recommendations on the number of words: https://theworld.com/%7Ereinhold/dicewarefaq.html#howlong

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Sure, but the average English speaker knows way more than 2048 words. Let's not forget about case sensitivity, made-up or "inside joke" words, names, and specific industry vocabulary.

[–] ammonium@lemmy.world 6 points 1 year ago (1 children)

Even if you take four words of a 30000 word list (quick Google says that's the number of words an average person knows), that's still less bits of entropy than a 5 word diceware password (7776 word list). People are also really bad at randomness, so your own string of random words is likely going to be much worse.

[–] elbarto777@lemmy.world 3 points 1 year ago (2 children)

Thanks for the explanation. What's diceware?

[–] poopkins@lemmy.world 4 points 1 year ago (1 children)

It's the concept of literally using a die to choose with randomness (humans are terrible at trying to be random); a link with details is in a previous comment.

[–] lolcatnip@reddthat.com 1 points 1 year ago

That only works if someone already has access to a system's password database.