[Cryptography] Passwords are dying - get over it

Jonathan Thornburg jthorn at astro.indiana.edu
Tue Dec 24 19:24:28 EST 2013


On Tue, 24 Dec 2013, Arnold Reinhold wrote:
> A 10 word Diceware? password has 129 bits of entropy.  Not trivial
> to memorize, but easier than your 13 words, and the individual words
> are shorter on average as well, e.g.:

What are the advantages & disadvantages of this (diceware) vs the old
"think of a long sentence or phrase, and take the 1st letter of each word"
scheme.  E.g. "FDR was elected to 3 full terms as US president & also
served part of a 4th term, but he was never vice-president" gives
  Fwet3ftaUp&aspoa4t,bhwnv-p
That's 26 characters, with surely at least 4 bits of entropy/character,
so we're comfortably over 100 bits of entropy.

-- 
-- "Jonathan Thornburg [remove -animal to reply]" <jthorn at astro.indiana-zebra.edu>
   Dept of Astronomy & IUCSS, Indiana University, Bloomington, Indiana, USA
   "There was of course no way of knowing whether you were being watched
    at any given moment.  How often, or on what system, the Thought Police
    plugged in on any individual wire was guesswork.  It was even conceivable
    that they watched everybody all the time."  -- George Orwell, "1984"


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