Just be sure to throw in symbols and numbers to beef it up. Dictionary words are easier to brute force.
Comment on Security expert reveals surprising way to make your password stronger: use emojis
Ertebolle@kbin.social 8 months ago
xkcd still has the best approach to this; four random common words
JigglySackles@lemmy.world 8 months ago
notapantsday@feddit.de 8 months ago
The whole idea is to make it easier for humans to remember and more difficult to brute force. Long passwords are much harder to brute force than complex passwords with lots of special characters. And they’re a lot easier for humans to remember.
There are enough words in any language that it’s virtually impossible to guess the correct four words, even if they’re in the dictionary.
JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz 8 months ago
Even so, most password requirements will force you to add them anyway. Quick way to do it is to just pick a number on a keyboard and add it and the symbol to the end. e.g HorseBattery2# and so on.
Jesus_666@feddit.de 8 months ago
And requirements like that are why my password strengths are completely out of whack:
- Random websites get 24 randomly generated printable characters stored in my password manager. This is essentially unbreakable with conventional methods and can easily be adapted to fit whichever counterproductive rules the website enforces.
- My password manager and my home computers get memorable but long phrases. A particular favorite is to start in the middle of a line from a song and continue from there. Nobody’s going to guess “make you swear and curse when you′re chewing on” but it’s easy to memorize of you already know the song. Even a dictionary attack is going to have trouble with that many words.
- My work accounts get the bare minimum that complies with whichever rules the admins came up with. Numbers, special characters and mixed capitalization? No thirty letter phrase for you, then; you’ll get the minimum eight characters so I have a chance of memorizing the thing. Regular password changes? Great, now the last two chargers are going to be incrementing digits, just like for everyone else.
There’s a reason why experts these days argue against anything but minimum length restrictions.
gonta@mander.xyz 8 months ago
You can even make a complete sentence that makes sense with symbols and numbers.
“Ronaldo doesn’t grill 76 Canadian Tacos.”
Or whatever
djdadi@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Not 4 of them in a row. Keep in mind the attacker doesn’t know " look for exactly 4 words"
Killing_Spark@feddit.de 8 months ago
That’s just security by obscurity. It’s one other strategy of choosing passwords that a bruteforce attack is going to try if it gets popular
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 8 months ago
That’s not what security by obscurity means. And going by your definition, all passwords are security by obscurity.
lupec@lemm.ee 8 months ago
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.
ammonium@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Four words is too low these days to protect against gpu bruteforcing
elbarto777@lemmy.world 8 months ago
Got a source on that?
ammonium@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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: theworld.com/~reinhold/dicewarefaq.html#howlong
elbarto777@lemmy.world 8 months ago
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.
lolcatnip@reddthat.com 8 months ago
That only works if someone already has access to a system’s password database.
Ookami38@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
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.
noodlejetski@lemm.ee 8 months ago
good luck remembering all of those for every account you create, though.
Fal@yiffit.net 8 months ago
Why are you not using a password manager
lemmyvore@feddit.nl 8 months ago
If you’re using a password manager you don’t need phrases you can remember.
noodlejetski@lemm.ee 8 months ago
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.
Ookami38@sh.itjust.works 8 months ago
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 likw your pw manager.
Kusimulkku@lemm.ee 8 months ago
Password database
vamputer@infosec.pub 8 months ago
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.
scinde@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
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).
Aatube@kbin.social 8 months ago
If the attacker doesn’t know that you’re using a dictionary password, then dictionary attacks probably won’t be their first choice.
scinde@discuss.tchncs.de 8 months ago
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.
aBundleOfFerrets@sh.itjust.works 7 months ago
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
scinde@discuss.tchncs.de 7 months ago
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.