this post was submitted on 03 Nov 2023
306 points (87.5% liked)
Technology
59629 readers
3336 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
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Just be sure to throw in symbols and numbers to beef it up. Dictionary words are easier to brute force.
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.
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.
And requirements like that are why my password strengths are completely out of whack:
There's a reason why experts these days argue against anything but minimum length restrictions.
You can even make a complete sentence that makes sense with symbols and numbers.
"Ronaldo doesn't grill 76 Canadian Tacos."
Or whatever
Not 4 of them in a row. Keep in mind the attacker doesn't know " look for exactly 4 words"
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
That's not what security by obscurity means. And going by your definition, all passwords are security by obscurity.
If your strategy is to just use dictionary words your password will have little entropy and even less so if you use grammatically correct sentences. If the attacker knows this is your strategy of choosing passwords cracking one is way easier than cracking a password that has the same length but consists of randomly chosen characters.
Your password is only safe because the attacker doesn't know your strategy of choosing the password which forces him to use inefficient methods of cracking it, while there would be a more efficient way if he knew the strategy you used. Which is security by obscurity.