

Long random words how to#
These issues are delightful and productive to ponder for those with a love for password generation nuance, but most laypeople just want to know how to choose a safe password. Brute forcing that is already more trouble than it's worth at three words, and five would require nation-state resources to crack. » gives you 12.9 bits of entropy per word.If they're selected randomly, an attacker has to use the complete source space for the random selection in a brute force attack. »IMHO, you CANNOT use straight dictionary words (regardless of language, and yes, I do mean Klingon and Sindarin!) in your passwords without some sort of numeric or symbolic character replacement pattern.Take, for example, the Slashdot discussion on this issue.Ī random selection of commenters’ thoughts on the entropy (i.e., the password strength/resistance to brute-force searching) of common-word passphrases: I am not adept at the mathematics involved, but random word passphrases certainly do have their proponents. The debate about how easily dictionary attacks can break passphrases is interesting. This is far better than passwords, which are usually under 10 bits by this same metric, but not high enough to make online guessing impractical without proper rate-limiting. Using a very rough estimate for the total number of phrases and some probability calculations, this produced an estimate that passphrase distribution provides only about 20 bits of security against an attacker trying to compromise 1% of available accounts. We found about 8,000 phrases using a 20,000 phrase dictionary.
Long random words movie#
The first experiment was a dictionary attack using lists of movie titles, sports team names, and dozens of other types of proper nouns crawled from Wikipedia, along with idiomatic phrases crawled from sources including Urban Dictionary. Error messages indicated when a passphrase was already in use.

In the original version of the Amazon site, passphrases had to be at least two words long. The goal wasn’t to evaluate the security of the scheme as deployed by Amazon, Bonneau says, but rather to learn more about how people choose passphrases in general.Īmazon’s was “a relatively limited data source”, he writes, but the research results do “suggest some caution on this approach”. To find such a selection of passphrases, his team used data crawled from the now-defunct Amazon PayPhrase system, introduced last year for US users only. Security researcher Joseph Bonneau reports, in a recent paper written with Ekaterina Shutova, that his team studied the problem by turning not to the theoretical space of choices but rather the real-life passphrases that people actually string together.
Long random words cracked#
While passphrases using dictionary words may not be as vulnerable as individual passwords, they may still be cracked by dictionary attacks, the research found. Research from the Computer Laboratory at the University of Cambridge suggests that this might not be so. Think that a passphrase of multiple, random dictionary words is as unguessable as long strings of gibberish, but easier to remember?
