How to create a strong password?
Tech Tips: How to create a strong password?
How to create a strong password?
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How to create a strong password?
Password strength is based on how difficult it would be for a potential attacker to successfully guess the password. In order to be secure, your password must be unique, random, and strong.
Under the right conditions, an attacker can potentially make tens of thousands to billions of guesses per second. Because attackers can check guesses so fast:
Re-using passwords is a bad idea — if an attacker has broken into another system you use and obtained passwords that way, the password you used on the other system will be their first guess, and variations of that password will be their next guesses.
Commonly-used passwords are insecure — it turns out that if you let most people create their own passwords, many people will use things like “Letmein”, “Football”, “Iloveyou”, “Starwars”, or “Whatever”. People also frequently use the name of pets or family members for passwords. Attackers will use lists of common passwords and common names as their next batch of guesses.
Dictionary words are also insecure — many people use words in their native language as the basis for a password, but lists of these words are also readily available to attackers.
Previously-compromised passwords — there are about 550,000,000 real passwords that have been compromised in previous password breaches. The attacker will try most or all of these before proceeding with a brute force attack.
Once the attacker has exhausted these four sources of passwords, they will often systematically try every possible password, because sooner or later this approach will work. This is a “brute force” attack. Often the attacker will use known weaknesses of the password system to speed up this process.
A password that has been randomly chosen from a very large set of possible passwords is your defense against this type of attack. To take a simple example, if my password is a single, randomly-chosen lowercase letter, then I have made one choice (a single letter), and there are 26 possible selections for that choice, resulting in a universe of 26 possible passwords. If you attempt to guess my one-letter password, then you have a 1 in 26 chance of guessing correctly on the first try, and you will certainly guess the correct password in no more than 26 tries.
Increasing the number of choices increases the strength of the password. If I use a 2-letter password, the order of the matter of the letter because “ox” and “xo” are different passwords. So there are two choices, each with 26 possible selections. This works out to 26 * 26 = 676 possible passwords.
Passwords don’t have to be letters. For example, if my password is an English dictionary word, there are about 8000 possible choices. If I chose two English words, there would be 8000 * 8000 = 16,000,000 possible choices.
For good security, we want a password that will be time-consuming for an attacker to guess, even if the attacker can make billions of guesses per second. Ideally, I’d like my account to remain secure even if the attacker has months or years to try to guess — so overall, we need a very large number of possible passwords
If my password is 12 characters, each one chosen from the 94 that are on a standard US keyboard, there are 94 * 94 * 94 * 94 * 94 * 94 * 94 * 94 * 94 * 94 * 94 * 94 = 475,900,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible passwords. If my password is six English words, there are about 8000 * 8000 * 8000 * 8000 * 8000 * 8000 = 262,100,000,000,000,000,000,000 possible choices. Either of these passwords would require the attacker to invest hundreds of thousands of years of computer time to successfully guess, even if the password is only protected by a simple hash.
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How to create a strong password
How to create a strong password
Reference: Guy Garnett ( Certified Information Systems Security Professional (CISSP) ). ” What makes a password so difficult to break/hack? ” originally appeared on Quora, the place to gain and share knowledge, empowering people to learn from others and better understand the world.
