Technology

37747 readers

170 users here now

A nice place to discuss rumors, happenings, innovations, and challenges in the technology sphere. We also welcome discussions on the intersections of technology and society. If it’s technological news or discussion of technology, it probably belongs here.

Remember the overriding ethos on Beehaw: Be(e) Nice. Each user you encounter here is a person, and should be treated with kindness (even if they’re wrong, or use a Linux distro you don’t like). Personal attacks will not be tolerated.

Subcommunities on Beehaw:

This community's icon was made by Aaron Schneider, under the CC-BY-NC-SA 4.0 license.

founded 2 years ago

MODERATORS

[email protected]

Massive data dump containing millions of passwords sparks security alert: Is your data safe? (www.techspot.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

40 comments fedilink hide all child comments

you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments

[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

For symmetric keys, since they cannot be weakened using quantum computing, their strength can be assessed by their bit-equivalent amount of entropy:

40 bit or less - easily breakable
64 bit - not so easy, but doable
128 bit or more - basically unbreakable

Those are equivalent to, respectively:

0-9 - 12, 19, 38 characters
a-z - 9, 14, 28 characters
a-z0-9 - 8, 12, 25 characters
A-Za-z0-9 - 7, 11, 22 characters
A-Za-z0-9+special - 7, 10, 21 characters

Moral of the story: drop the special characters, and even the numbers... and even the uppercase. A 30+ character long all-lowercase pass phrase, is already unbreakable.

Check @[email protected]:

finance-caffeine-utopia-redress ~~-unseen~~

...is already over 128 bits.

PS: Correct horse battery staple