How Well Hidden is Your Needle?. After all searches of common passwords and dictionaries have failed, an attacker must resort to a “brute force” search – ultimately trying every possible combination of letters, numbers and then symbols until the combination you chose, is discovered. If every possible password is tried, sooner or later yours will be found. The question is: Will that be too soon . Please see the discussion below for additional information. GRC's Interactive Brute Force Password “Search Space” Calculator(NOTHING you do here ever leaves your browser.

What happens here, stays here.). Enter and edit your test passwords in the field above while viewing the analysis below. Search Space Depth (Alphabet): Search Space Length (Characters): Exact Search Space Size (Count): (count of all possible passwordswith this alphabet size and upto this password's length)Search Space Size (as a power of 1. Online Attack Scenario: (Assuming one thousand guesses per second)–Offline Fast Attack Scenario: (Assuming one hundred billion guesses per second)–Massive Cracking Array Scenario: (Assuming one hundred trillion guesses per second)–Note that typical attacks will be online password guessinglimited to, at most, a few hundred guesses per second.(The Haystack Calculator has been viewed 4,1. IMPORTANT!!! Yet the Search Space Calculator above shows the time to search for those two passwords online (assuming a very fast online rate of 1,0. If “1. 23. 45. 6” is the first password that's guessed, that wouldn't take 1. And no password cracker would wait 1.

Password” is the magic phrase. Okay. The calculator then puts the resulting large numbers (with lots of digits or large powers of ten) into a real world context of the time that would be required (assuming differing search speeds) to exhaustively search every password up through that length, assuming the use of the chosen alphabet.

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How can I apply this to my daily life? Answering that question is the reason this page exists. The whole point of using padded passwords is to adopt a much more you- friendly approach to password design. On June 1st, Leo Laporte and I recorded our weekly Security Now! You may download a shortened, 3. Haystack calculator concepts: The main concept can be understood by answering this question: Which of the following two passwords is stronger,more secure, and more difficult to crack?

D0g........... Pr. Xyc. N(n. 4k. 77#L! Vd. Afp. 9You probably know this is a trick question, but the answer is: Despite the fact that the first password is HUGELY easier to use and more memorable, it is also the stronger of the two! In fact, since it is one character longer and contains uppercase, lowercase, a number and special characters, that first password would take an attacker approximately 9. ENTROPY: If you are mathematically inclined, or if you have some security knowledge and training, you may be familiar with the idea of the “entropy” or the randomness and unpredictability of data.

If so, you'll have noticed that the first, stronger password has much less entropy than the second (weaker) password. Virtually everyone has always believed or been told that passwords derived their strength from having “high entropy”. But as we see now, when the only available attack is guessing, that long- standing common wisdom  . But that doesn't matter, because the attacker is totally blind to the way your passwords look.

The old expression “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades” applies here. The only thing an attacker can know is whether a password guess was an exact match . The attacker doesn't know how long the password is, nor anything about what it might look like. So after exhausting all of the standard password cracking lists, databases and dictionaries, the attacker has no option other than to either give up and move on to someone else, or start guessing every possible password. Instead, YOU should invent your own personal padding policy. You could put some padding in front, and/or interspersed through the phrase, and/or add some more to the end. You could put some characters at the beginning, padding in the middle, and more characters at the end.

And also mix- up the padding characters by using simple memorable character pictures like “< -> ” or “. Dell Xp Pro Sp2 Oem Dodge. We must always assume that an attacker is as smart as possible (and most are). So, knowing that 4. Only after an all lowercase search out to some length has failed will an attacker decide that the unknown target password must contain additional types of characters. So, in essence, by deliberately using at least one of each type of character, we are forcing the attacker to search the largest possible password space, because our password won't ever be found in any of the smaller spaces.

Q: So, from the answer above, that means that our passwords should always contain at least one of each type of character? A: Yes, that's exactly what it means. Take, for example, the very weak password “news.” If another lowercase character was added to it (for example to form “newsy”), the total password search space is increased by 2. But if, instead, an exclamation point was added, (making it “news!”), the total search space is increased by a whopping 1,5.

That's how important it is to choose passwords having at least one of every type of character. If anyone ever does try to crack your password, you will have eliminated all shorter searches. Q: Is there an optimum character mixture? A: Yes. Since most users will likely always be choosing all lowercase characters you'll want to stay as far away from that as possible. And, similarly, the fewest number of users will ever be using many special symbol characters. So the wisest attacker will aim for the herd, searching through lowercase passwords first and symbol- oriented passwords last.

Since this is one race which you want to finish last (meaning never) using more symbol characters is highly recommended. But remember: Not only symbols, since you first want to have every type of character represented to force a “full depth” search. Password Related Links.