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Are you using passphrases? Is it worth it? (discuss.tchncs.de)

submitted 7 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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Nowadays, most people use password managers (hopefully). However, there are still some passwords that you need to memorize, like master password (for a password manager), phone lock, wifi password, etc.

Security wise, can passphrase reach the strength of a good password without getting so long that it defeats the purpose of even using it?

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[–] [email protected] 5 points 7 months ago (1 children)

https://bitwarden.com/password-strength/

Test it here. Passphrases of 3 words take centuries to crack, without any numbers or capital letters. Passwords with numbers, capital letters, and symbols need ~14 characters to be that secure. If you need to memorize it, a passphrase is far superior. Add in a number, or random capitalization, or a misspelling and your security goes even higher.

[–] [email protected] 8 points 7 months ago (1 children)

One caveat I'd want to note is for the underlying methodology that uses:

As this study by Joseph Bonneau attests, people frequently choose common phrases in addition to common words. zxcvbn would be better if it recognized "Harry Potter" as a common phrase, rather than a semi-common name and surname. Google's n-gram corpus fits in a terabyte, and even a good bigram list is impractical to download browser-side, so this functionality would require server-side evaluation and infrastructure cost. Server-side evaluation would also allow a much larger single-word dictionary, such as Google's unigram set.

As another example, the passphrase "This password is good" is claimed to take centuries to crack, but if the search space were narrowed down from a sequence of words to grammatically correct sentences, certain passphrases would be much weaker than this would show.

[–] [email protected] 2 points 7 months ago

You should indeed use a password manager to randomize the generated password phrases. Bitwarden adds capitals, numbers and other characters to the password phrases.