A poll, aimed in particular at people who think they understand the technologies around password cracking. Assume that there is at least one password that you need to be strong and need to remember & type not-infrequently. How many characters is enough for you to feel comfortable in 2024? Assume any char you can type easily is available.
[May need a follow-up poll if the majority is at >=12]
[Boost if you’re interested in the result]
@timbray Hive Systems has a pretty neat table showing password cracking of bcrypt
http://www.hivesystems.com/library
password: cybersecurityforeveryone
@timbray @gigantos Ah gotcha... In my case neither the password nor its hash are stored anywhere.
User enters a password, a bcrypt hash is generated, which is used as the key to attempt to AES decrypt a password vault file. And either the hash worked or it didn't. No storing anything except an AES encrypted file per user.
Does that make sense? It's described here: https://david.dlma.com/blog/internet-security
@mdione @dblume @timbray The way I understand it, this is on some level identical to /etc/shadow or a database with bcrypt. The attacker still needs to handle one user at the time, and no work can be shared between each user. As you say, you can achieve a similar effect by using more rounds.
One difference though is the size of the data you need to exfiltrate.
@mdione @gigantos @timbray Yep, but in practice the vaults are usually less than a few MB big, so not very big. And there are never many at one install, it intentionally doesn't scale to be large enough for any install to be a tasty target.
A goal was less "surface" for attack. All there is to get would be a few encrypted vaults. I liked the idea of not storing hashes.
There's a README that illustrates the design here: https://github.com/dblume/tiny-vault
Tim Bray
gigantos
David Blume
Marcos Dione