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  • Author Author: clem57
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Why passwords are important...

clem57

     I know a lot of you are thinking, why bother about passwords? Well let me clue you in. Many passwords we use are very weak. Let me list a few and show how long it would take to break with modern computers.

 

        • password     This is in the top 5 common list of passwords used.
        • pickles         This is in the top 2160 common list of passwords used
        • milkbad        This would take 800 milliseconds because just letters and short
        • mIlkBaD       This would take 2 minutes because short and only letters
        • m1ln2aD      This would take 6 minutes. Now we have numbers and mixed letters, but too short and no symbols
        • m1$k3a%     This would take 1 minutes. Ops, not enough to fix the problem. Too short.
        • qwerty12345asdf    Wow! finally one that would take 701,000 years to brute force attack.
        • qw$rty12#45as*f     Adding in the symbols we get 130,000,000 years to brute force attack.

 

So in conclusion, it takes the following things to make a password strong.

  1. More than 8 characters or even  more than 16 characters.
  2. Upper and lower case. This helps double the choices from 26 to 52.
  3. Add in numbers and symbols. One without the other can weaken the password.
  4. Finally, use a password generator and stored database like KeePass for instance.

 

If you wish to play around with your choices, I found this great site https://www.comparitech.com/privacy-security-tools/password-strength-test/#password-test-tool .

Give it a spin and comment below on your experience. I would like to know what is the toughest password using the above tool?

Anyone up to the challenge. Oh a password generator does not count! image

Parents Comment Children
  • in reply to BigG

    They have good microcontrollers with hardware encryption accelerators and safe protected key storage.

    Their software staff (web developers, but also those that write examples for the hardware that supports secure operation) seem to be on a different level.

  • in reply to BigG

      wrote:

     

    I just so happened to request a new password on Microchip.com. My password choice failed.

     

    Talk about a bad password rule. Has to be one of the weakest security rule I've seen in a very long time... someone to speak to them... image

     

    image

    Are you serious of no special characters? This can lead to a dictionary attack at least. And 15 characters is not very long entropy either.

    Clem