Matthew GreenSomebody asked whether dictionary-word passphrases (“correct horse battery staple”, like the ones generated by 1Password) are any good. Short answer: good means different things. Shorter answer: yes!
I’ll talk about why in a thread below.
That Anonymous Coward
שי ברגר 
Shai BergerIt should be noted, though, that this recommendation as cited is now out of date. Another response here included the table of bits in passwords and how long it would take to crack them; the XKCD says four words, for ~44 bits, and that is now in the low rows -- it would take only hours for an attacker with significant, but not excessive, computational power. To be reasonably secure, you need six words now (as noted in original thread).
David Penfold :verified: (@[email protected])
Attached: 1 image @[email protected] I like this
LN 
@shaib @That_AC @matthew_d_green surely this number depends on the language. German would probably need fewer words than French if the number of characters is the concern.
@alan @That_AC @matthew_d_green
The number of characters is of almost no concern at all. The important number is the size of the set of words to be chosen from (the XKCD used an estimate of ~2K common words in English; according to OP, the 1Password set is about an order of magnitude larger).
The number of characters is of almost no concern at all. The important number is the size of the set of words to be chosen from (the XKCD used an estimate of ~2K common words in English; according to OP, the 1Password set is about an order of magnitude larger).
@shaib @That_AC @matthew_d_green Doesn't this assume the attacker knows the password is a pass phrase (and what characters are used as separators if any, and if capitalization is used in any way - e.g. in German this effectively doubles the attempts for any pass phrase containing an umlaut or esszett, plus also doubling any pass phrase containing a noun).
@shaib
E.g. "Wirsing gekrönt Hof blau Kinder" could be any of
wirsing-gekroent-hof-blau-kinder
Wirsing-gekroent-Hof-blau-Kinder
Wirsing-gekrönt-Hof-blau-Kinder
wirsing-gekrönt-hof-blau-kinder
Plus the same for any other separator.
Not to mention that password managers like Bitwarden offer appending a random 3-4 digit number, which further complicates brute forcing.
I understand that the entropy in theory is less than generating an arbitrary string of the same length, but using word count and pool size alone also doesn't sound right.
@alan
Yes, spelling variations should be useful in terms of entropy. It's a trade-off, though: if you don't always use the most straightforward spelling, you pay in memorability.
Yes, spelling variations should be useful in terms of entropy. It's a trade-off, though: if you don't always use the most straightforward spelling, you pay in memorability.
emurphy42@That_AC @matthew_d_green Also https://xkcd.com/538/ but that's only if they specifically care about one account, as opposed to "okay we stole a whole database, which ones are easiest to crack and then do something useful with".
