A Really Good Article on How Easy it Is to Crack Passwords

Remember, security against cracking is a combination of <i>password strength</i> and <i>key derivation function strength</i>. Nothing will save you if your password is &quot;password&quot;. Not much will save you if your password is hashed with MD5.<p>But scrypt can be over 100,000,000 time stronger than MD5 -- so if you&#x27;re using scrypt you can afford to use a password which is 100,000,000 times weaker. &quot;jdtwbv&quot; hashed using scrypt is stronger than &quot;H.*W8Jz&amp;r3&quot; hashed using MD5.

&gt; &quot;This is an answer to the batteryhorsestaple thing.&quot;<p>Steube misunderstands the xkcd comic [1]. There&#x27;s a really good comment which explains it: &quot;It could be argued that Randall&#x27;s example of 4 words is too short -- and indeed, for some applications, it is. However for a typical dictionary size, and genuinely random selection, it is massively stronger than &quot;typical&quot; passwords and in fact easily adequte to defeat the above-mentioned attacks.&quot; [2]<p>Emphasis on &quot;genuinely random selection.&quot;<p>[1] <a href="https://xkcd.com/936/" rel="nofollow">https:&#x2F;&#x2F;xkcd.com&#x2F;936&#x2F;</a><p>[2] <a href="http://www.schneier.com/blog/archives/2013/06/a_really_good_a.html#c1483848" rel="nofollow">http:&#x2F;&#x2F;www.schneier.com&#x2F;blog&#x2F;archives&#x2F;2013&#x2F;06&#x2F;a_really_good_...</a>

&#x27;<i>Also included in the list: &quot;all of the lights&quot; (yes, spaces are allowed on many sites), &quot;i hate hackers,&quot; &quot;allineedislove,&quot; &quot;ilovemySister31,&quot; &quot;iloveyousomuch,&quot; &quot;Philippians4:13,&quot; &quot;Philippians4:6-7,&quot; and &quot;qeadzcwrsfxv1331.&quot; &quot;gonefishing1125&quot; was another password Steube saw appear on his computer screen. Seconds after it was cracked, he noted, &quot;You won&#x27;t ever find it using brute force.&quot;</i>&#x27;<p>If you won&#x27;t ever find &quot;gonefishing1125&quot; using brute force, how on earth did they find &quot;qeadzcwrstxv1331&quot;?

Passwords are broken and I really wish we would all move away from them. Persona is a nice idea with regards to privacy and control, but it&#x27;s still a password that you need to remember, which can be cracked. Also, people generally don&#x27;t use strong passwords.<p>What irks me is that every OS in use today has support for strong cryptography and browser vendors could easily integrate that. We would no longer register for a website, we would simply upload our &quot;Online Identity&quot; or whatever we called it. This of course is just an id_rsa.pub with maybe name and email in the comment. The remote site stores the public key and the browser authenticates using the private key, stored securely in the keychain.<p>This has the potential to be invisible to users, and thus used by default, and highly secure since the local keychain can generate incredibly strong keys, all behind the scenes.

I like schemes that have an explicit input of n random bits (or where you can at least have a good estimate on the entropy.) With the Schneier Scheme I can not be sure of the actual entropy of my password. Maybe my brain only generates a relatively small set of sentences which can be reverse-engineered from my comments on HN? :-)<p>A good algorithm would take n bits and map them uniquely to a set of strings that are easy to remember for a human. The apg utility does something like that.

Why not force the user to have strong login credentials?<p>I&#x27;m creating an online system that will store users&#x27; sensitive financial data. When setting up an account, the user will have to choose a password as normal, but will also be given a passphrase of the form &quot;correct horse battery staple&quot; that <i>they must write down</i>. To log in, the user will need to enter (a) username; (b) password; and (c) passphrase.<p>It is effectively a poor man&#x27;s two-factor authentication - the second factor being the piece of paper containing the passphrase. I think it strikes a good balance between security, convenience and cost.<p>What do others think of this approach?

People seem to forget this important fact - That hashes get leaked. Without a hash corresponding to a user account it&#x27;s quite hard to break in to a given account with a moderately reasonable password, even if the hash can be &#x27;broken&#x27; in milliseconds.

One benefit of being a indian language speaker (or other language not in hackers dictionary) is we can easily choose reasonably secure passwords that are remember-able by simply using native language phrases (combined with numbers and mixed caps)

The Ars article seemed totally irrelevant to me since it used MD5?

I don&#x27;t understand the difference between &quot;momof3g8kids&quot; and &quot;tlpWENT2m&quot;. Why would the latter be more secure?