Password complexity

[viper2110]

So as I understand it if my password is something like “I drive a red car down the road” or “I was born on the 6th day and it was raining” the passwords are easy for me to remember but should be difficult to crack?

 

[burn]

So as I understand it if my password is something like “I drive a red car down the road” or “I was born on the 6th day and it was raining” the passwords are easy for me to remember but should be difficult to crack?

Yup, that's how I understood it anyway. There was an in depth Ars Technica article (I think) that went into password cracking and one of the crackers recommended this. Have been using this plain word sentence/ combination technique ever since.

 

[AlphaJohn]

Yup, that's how I understood it anyway. There was an in depth Ars Technica article (I think) that went into password cracking and one of the crackers recommended this. Have been using this plain word sentence/ combination technique ever since.

Also saw the article, but if I remember they said random words where better than clear sentence structure. Using 5 words with space is better than say using "I love the rain today"

What I tend to do personally is repeat 4 random words and the site's name for example:
Facebook would be "house deodorant facebook entertainment"
Twitter would be "house deodorant twitter entertainment"
and so on.

Edit: Some interesting reading on security from Ars

Anatomy of a hack: How crackers ransack passwords like “qeadzcwrsfxv1331” : http://arstechnica.com/security/2013/05/how-crackers-make-minced-meat-out-of-your-passwords/
The secret to online safety: Lies, random characters, and a password manager: http://arstechnica.com/information-...ies-random-characters-and-a-password-manager/

 

[MKFrost]

The main strength of a sentence password is the length. With the addition of every character you exponentially increase the possible combinations. So its not that its so hard to crack but that it would take forever to do so due to the large number of possible combinations.

Just add a full stop '.' at the end of your sentence password and you increase the complexity tenfold.

 

[eCliPSe]

The main strength of a sentence password is the length. With the addition of every character you exponentially increase the possible combinations. So its not that its so hard to crack but that it would take forever to do so due to the large number of possible combinations.

Just add a full stop '.' at the end of your sentence password and you increase the complexity tenfold.

So true! Also if you use something like an sentence use upper case and lower case as well ,end it with an "!" and in between the words use an "." and you are golden.

At the end its all up to computing power. If you perhaps have access to a number of supercomputers and a recently upgraded GPU cluster it makes it so much easier

md5 hashes are quick the sha256 slower and it gets slower as the bit length of the encryption increases due to the complexity. I am by no means a cryptologist but understand that the longer and the more complex anything it is the longer it takes to break. Nothing is uncrackable. Its about how much cycles and time you want to invest.

 

[Nephew_]

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+1

 

[Compton_effect]

The point is, if you have that much time to wait for some guys password to be hacked someone will have picked it up by then.
Try doing rainbow tables against a bank login and see what happens.

Aint nobody got time fo that!

'It doesn't matter how complex your password is if they start cutting your fingers off' - Security Expert at Tech-ed 2010 on Cyber Crime.

 

[AlphaJohn]

'It doesn't matter how complex your password is if they start cutting your fingers off' - Security Expert at Tech-ed 2010 on Cyber Crime.

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Talking about cutting fingers, when I was in Uni I was taught that Bio-metrics should never be used as a one time security measure, rather to use it as an identifier with second system like the normal password. I think Apple missed that class?

 

[hellfire]

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This is one of my favorite XKCDs.
I tweeted it to FNB a while back when I first registered for internet banking and they have their ridiculous password complexity enforcement (1 uppercase AND 1 number AND 1 special character)

EDIT: This isn't necessarily awful on my PC where any special character key is no harder to enter than a number or an upper case letter.
However, when you need to enter these in on a touch device, it becomes arduous