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Q&A

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Comments on Are "strong passwords" at all meaningful?

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Are "strong passwords" at all meaningful?

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Whenever registering to diverse sites on the net, you are often forced to enter a so called "strong password", which would ideally contain both upper case letters, lower case letters, digits, and some other character like punctuation. As hard to remember as possible.

What I don't understand from a software development point of view is how these characters would make that much of a difference.

All of it seems to assume that a hacker trying to break a password would utilize so-called brute force. That is: try "A", try "B" ... "try AA" and so on. The more variations, the longer it takes to execute the brute force algorithm.

If I have a password of up to 10 capital letters A to Z plus "empty", that's 27 combinations, for a total of 2710 combinations.

As opposed to having a 10 letter password in the whole UTF8/ASCII 7 bit range, 127 combinations - 32 non-printable + 1 empty = 96, for a total of 9610 combinations.

Sure, a significant difference, astronomical even. But... if they would execute a brute force across TCP/IP they can maybe try one combination every millisecond or something, assuming great bandwidth. Worst case scenario for the 2710 scenario is then 57 days. Some 4 weeks on average. Assuming there's no big latency or packet drop for a significant lower bandwidth, in which case this isn't really feasible at all.

I don't see anyone setting up a brute force operation for that in order to access John Doe's Gmail account or whatever... it is already too much of an obstacle. Unless they hope to get lucky on the initial bunch permutations, which can of course happen.

Assuming that brute force is actually what's used, which sounds quite unlikely to me. Instead of something else entirely: keyword logging, packet sniffing, the human factor ("Hi this is your bank please send us your password") etc etc.

So is the usefulness of this whole "strong password" thing just an urban legend, where companies force us to memorize ridiculously hard to remember passwords for no real gain? Why is the number of symbol table combinations in the password oh so important on almost any Internet site these days?

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5 comment threads

Security theater (3 comments)
Relevant XKCD: https://xkcd.com/936/ (3 comments)
See also: SE thread "What is your way to create good passwords that can actually be remembered?" (1 comment)
I think the question becomes more interesting in the context of most popular services (and most workp... (1 comment)
Off-topic (5 comments)
Off-topic

You should focus the question more into Software development. The only real strong argument for why this question belongs on Software, and not Power Users, that I can find, is that it's an attempt at providing programmers good advice when implementing password authentication for their services. But in reality, this question really reads as something not-development-related, and seems more for the end user, than the developer.

Especially this subquestion isn't for this site:

Why is the number of symbol table combinations in the password oh so important on almost any Internet site these days?

Lundin‭ wrote 11 months ago

Andreas witnessed the end of the world today‭ I don't really see how anyone without software security knowledge would be able to answer this. It takes a programmer simply to understand the number of combinations enabled in the symbol table.

Iizuki‭ wrote 11 months ago

I'm guessing Software Development just acts as a "default tech community" when there's not a precise match available in Codidact. Given the options available, posting here seems reasonable to me.

Lundin‭ wrote 11 months ago

Otherwise, I'm not opposed of having this migrated to Power Users if it fits better there.