Comment on [deleted]
F04118F@feddit.nl 4 weeks ago
There’s literally only 4 characters difference between all their passwords, even if those would be completely random, that’s very bad.
They don’t seem to understand that it’s not about how many samples you need to see to be sure what their Amazon password is. The problem is that if one of their passwords ever leaks, some bot can brute-force try thousands of variations on it and find any other password very quickly (they effectively only have to guess 4 characters, plus a bit to find that it’s the first 4 to change).
How can anyone think this is more secure than having completely different and long passwords for every site?
They probably don’t understand that your pw manager’s password is safer because you don’t enter it anywhere, only into your password manager (ideally with 2FA). This person is effectively spreading their master password around by putting it as the core of ALL their passwords, significantly increasing the risk that it leaks.
throwawayacc0430@sh.itjust.works 4 weeks ago
So the 4 characters is just my way to explain their system, I don’t actually know how many characters they use in their “unique” part of the password, but the idea is that the unique part of the password is derived from the website’s name.
F04118F@feddit.nl 4 weeks ago
Obviously random is better, but uniqueness of passwords is IMO even more important. They are effectively spreading around their master password
Clent@lemmy.dbzer0.com 4 weeks ago
The relationship is the problem.
Calculating the levenshtein distance is the first thing that comes to mind, then creating a regular expression that covers any leaked passwords tied to the same account.
This is all easily scriptable and two leaked passwords might be all a script needs to discover the pattern. Once the pattern is known, all of their passwords become knowable.