Password strength and cracking

Non-investing personal finance issues including insurance, credit, real estate, taxes, employment and legal issues such as trusts and wills.
Post Reply
Topic Author
ikowik
Posts: 392
Joined: Tue Dec 23, 2014 5:52 pm

Password strength and cracking

Post by ikowik »

1Password has a blog post I found interesting and actionable. They set a challenge with a monetary prizes to crack account passwords, and discuss results.

https://blog.1password.com/cracking-challenge-update/
afan
Posts: 8192
Joined: Sun Jul 25, 2010 4:01 pm

Re: Password strength and cracking

Post by afan »

That article seems to be based on brute force password cracking, which I thought crooks rarely bother with. They can get many passwords by using known passwords and common human strategies for picking them. If you are so important that they specifically want yours, then this might be a useful guide. If they just want to get into as many accounts as they can do easily, this does not have much relevance.
Since it is a security company, I assume they would have used truly random passwords, so brute force would be the only way to get them. In real life, most people don't create long random passwords if they have to remember them.
We don't know how to beat the market on a risk-adjusted basis, and we don't know anyone that does know either | --Swedroe | We assume that markets are efficient, that prices are right | --Fama
Post Reply