350
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
350 points (100.0% liked)
Technology
59554 readers
2798 users here now
This is a most excellent place for technology news and articles.
Our Rules
- Follow the lemmy.world rules.
- Only tech related content.
- Be excellent to each another!
- Mod approved content bots can post up to 10 articles per day.
- Threads asking for personal tech support may be deleted.
- Politics threads may be removed.
- No memes allowed as posts, OK to post as comments.
- Only approved bots from the list below, to ask if your bot can be added please contact us.
- Check for duplicates before posting, duplicates may be removed
Approved Bots
founded 1 year ago
MODERATORS
xkcd still has the best approach to this; four random common words
I like doing entire phrases with some rhymes thrown in. Makes it easier to remember them.
"BonyTonyMoansHe'sOnlyGrownLonely" has a shitload of characters, and a full sentence (even a nonsensical one like that) is more memorable to me than a random handful of disparate words.
The more ridiculous, the better. (And, naturally, don't forget your numbers and symbols)
EDIT: Actually, no idea why I made it all one group of words. So long as spaces are in the password's character space (and they very well should be if friggin' emojis are), there's nothing stopping you from doing an entire, punctuated sentence- other than that we've been conditioned not to think of a password that way.
"Skinny Kenny's friend, Mini Ben, has 20 chins." That should be a fully-acceptable password with 46 characters (48 if you add the quotes), capital letters, numbers, and special characters.
You can't compare a 46 random character password to a password composed out of words, the entropy of each is very different. Your kind of password is vulnerable to dictionary attacks which are way more common and easy than brute forcing every possibility. A 50+ characters unique random password for each service that is stored in a password manager which is encrypted with a 20+ characters random password is the most secure and future proof (for now).
If the attacker doesn’t know that you’re using a dictionary password, then dictionary attacks probably won’t be their first choice. I want to remember these passwords across devices and on guests.
Like someone else said on this thread; that's just security by obscurity, which is bad. Dictionary attacks will be one of the first (brute force related) attacks attackers will use because word passwords are incredibly popular (though admittedly of fewer words: VeryBigDog34 etc..), and relatively easy to do. I agree that having the password across different devices is somewhat of a challenge with a password manager, but not impossible. My very long and complex password is all down to muscle memory by this point, I couldn't tell you what it is from memory.
Also you shouldn't use the same password on multiple things and if you don't use a password manager you will need to memorize a lot of different passwords.
Dictionary attacks aren’t some magic bullet. There are a lot of english words and just four of them IS comparable in cracking difficult to a standard 8-char password that is as random as you can make it. There are a lot more words than there are symbols. Four words is obviously not as good as 46 totally random chars
Dictionary attacks are definitely not a magic bullet, they require a lot of processing power, just like any other brute-force attack, but not more because of their longer length, as has been implied.
True, there are a lot of english words, but the amount of common words is relatively small. Most people aren't going to choose a password like "MachicolationRemonstranceCircumambulationSchadenfreude", even if it were generated for them (which is unlikely).
Sure, it is comparable to a standard 8 characters passward, but even that kind of password is verging on the insecure (it is the absolute minimum, which should be avoided when possible).
There are also a lot of symbols when you count emojies and the entire Unicode standard.
I love it, Bitwarden has supported generating passphrase style passwords for a while and it's basically that. It's my go-to these days.
Four words is too low these days to protect against gpu bruteforcing
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.
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
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.
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.
Thanks for the explanation. What's diceware?
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.
Thanks.
https://theworld.com/~reinhold/diceware.html
Thanks.
That only works if someone already has access to a system's password database.
I prefer picking a sentence or so that has meaning to me, using the first letters, and then adjusting for numbers/symbols. So if I wanted to make that a pw, it'd be 1ppa505thm2m,utfl,atafn/5. -looks completely unintelligible, but as long as you can remember the sentence and have some ideas of how you would have encoded it, easy enough to remember/recreate.
good luck remembering all of those for every account you create, though.
Why are you not using a password manager
If you're using a password manager you don't need phrases you can remember, you can generate even more secure passwords. Or start using passkeys.
I want cross-device
Most are cross device. Use bitwarden
Guest machines too. And I sorta prefer whichever browser/OS I’m using’s implementation because they’re usually styled similarly.
I am, and I'm not jumping through hoops of making up a password sentence for every new website. I let Bitwarden take care of that for me.
Just use these methods for the pws you either need to know (like your password manager) or don't want stored for whatever reason, like your bank. Otherwise, yeah, just let your password manager generate a password for whatever site.
It's as easy to remember a bunch of those as it is remembering 4 random words with no association, I think. And besides, just use that for the big, important, pws like your pw manager.
Password database