Assuming the attacker knows it’s a phrase: The english language alone has some 800.000 words. 800.000^6 = 2*10^35 combinations in a dictionary attack. That’s comparable to 18 random ASCII characters. We might also be using a different language, or a combination of languages.
A long string of random characters will give you more combinations per password length, but there are some passwords you just need to be able to memorize, and I’d say that’s more likely with the 6 words.
kuberoot@discuss.tchncs.de 1 week ago
Obligatory xkcd.
I don’t know enough to say how accurate the numbers are, but the sentiment stands - if it’s a password you’re memorizing, longer password will probably be better.
Jyek@sh.itjust.works 1 week ago
That’s not even the case though. Using a memorized passphrase that can be broken down into individual words is susceptible to dictionary attacks provided you know what the length of the password is. You can algorithmically sort away swathes of the dictionary based on how many likely word combinations exist before searching unusual word combinations. The thing is, passwords suck. It doesn’t matter how long the password is, if someone wants in, they’ll crack the password or steal it via some other means. Instead of relying on a strong password, you need to be relying on additional proof factors for sign in. Proper MFA with actual secure implementation is far more secure than any password scheme. And additionally, hardware key authentication is even more secure. If you are signing into an account and storing important data there, you do not want to rely on passwords to keep that data secure.
The reason for the character limit on passwords is often to prevent malicious attacks via data dumping in the password dialogue box. Longer numbers take more CPU cycles to properly salt and encrypt. Malicious actors may dump as many characters in a password system as they wish if they wanted to take down a service or at least hurt performance.
Additionally, even if you just used lowercase letters, an 18 character password would take 12 RTX 5090s approximately 284 thousand years to crack according to the recent Hive Systems report.
24 characters is more than enough to be secure as far as passwords alone go. Just know that, nobody is out here brute forcing passwords at any length these days, there are infinite more clever ways of hacking accounts than that.
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