• vamputer@infosec.pub
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      1 year ago

      I like doing entire phrases with some rhymes thrown in. Makes it easier to remember them.

      “BonyTonyMoansHe’sOnlyGrownLonely” has a shitload of characters, and a full sentence (even a nonsensical one like that) is more memorable to me than a random handful of disparate words.

      The more ridiculous, the better. (And, naturally, don’t forget your numbers and symbols)

      EDIT: Actually, no idea why I made it all one group of words. So long as spaces are in the password’s character space (and they very well should be if friggin’ emojis are), there’s nothing stopping you from doing an entire, punctuated sentence- other than that we’ve been conditioned not to think of a password that way.

      “Skinny Kenny’s friend, Mini Ben, has 20 chins.” That should be a fully-acceptable password with 46 characters (48 if you add the quotes), capital letters, numbers, and special characters.

      • scinde@discuss.tchncs.de
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        1 year ago

        You can’t compare a 46 random character password to a password composed out of words, the entropy of each is very different. Your kind of password is vulnerable to dictionary attacks which are way more common and easy than brute forcing every possibility. A 50+ characters unique random password for each service that is stored in a password manager which is encrypted with a 20+ characters random password is the most secure and future proof (for now).

        • Aatube@kbin.social
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          1 year ago

          If the attacker doesn’t know that you’re using a dictionary password, then dictionary attacks probably won’t be their first choice. I want to remember these passwords across devices and on guests.

          • scinde@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            Like someone else said on this thread; that’s just security by obscurity, which is bad. Dictionary attacks will be one of the first (brute force related) attacks attackers will use because word passwords are incredibly popular (though admittedly of fewer words: VeryBigDog34 etc…), and relatively easy to do. I agree that having the password across different devices is somewhat of a challenge with a password manager, but not impossible. My very long and complex password is all down to muscle memory by this point, I couldn’t tell you what it is from memory.

            Also you shouldn’t use the same password on multiple things and if you don’t use a password manager you will need to memorize a lot of different passwords.

        • ferret@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          Dictionary attacks aren’t some magic bullet. There are a lot of english words and just four of them IS comparable in cracking difficult to a standard 8-char password that is as random as you can make it. There are a lot more words than there are symbols. Four words is obviously not as good as 46 totally random chars

          • scinde@discuss.tchncs.de
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            1 year ago

            Dictionary attacks are definitely not a magic bullet, they require a lot of processing power, just like any other brute-force attack, but not more because of their longer length, as has been implied.

            True, there are a lot of english words, but the amount of common words is relatively small. Most people aren’t going to choose a password like “MachicolationRemonstranceCircumambulationSchadenfreude”, even if it were generated for them (which is unlikely).

            Sure, it is comparable to a standard 8 characters passward, but even that kind of password is verging on the insecure (it is the absolute minimum, which should be avoided when possible).

            There are also a lot of symbols when you count emojies and the entire Unicode standard.

    • Lupec@lemm.ee
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      1 year ago

      I love it, Bitwarden has supported generating passphrase style passwords for a while and it’s basically that. It’s my go-to these days.

    • JigglySackles@lemmy.world
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      1 year ago

      Just be sure to throw in symbols and numbers to beef it up. Dictionary words are easier to brute force.

      • notapantsday@feddit.de
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        1 year ago

        The whole idea is to make it easier for humans to remember and more difficult to brute force. Long passwords are much harder to brute force than complex passwords with lots of special characters. And they’re a lot easier for humans to remember.

        There are enough words in any language that it’s virtually impossible to guess the correct four words, even if they’re in the dictionary.

        • JohnEdwa@sopuli.xyz
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          1 year ago

          Even so, most password requirements will force you to add them anyway. Quick way to do it is to just pick a number on a keyboard and add it and the symbol to the end. e.g HorseBattery2# and so on.

          • Jesus_666@feddit.de
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            1 year ago

            And requirements like that are why my password strengths are completely out of whack:

            • Random websites get 24 randomly generated printable characters stored in my password manager. This is essentially unbreakable with conventional methods and can easily be adapted to fit whichever counterproductive rules the website enforces.
            • My password manager and my home computers get memorable but long phrases. A particular favorite is to start in the middle of a line from a song and continue from there. Nobody’s going to guess “make you swear and curse when you′re chewing on” but it’s easy to memorize of you already know the song. Even a dictionary attack is going to have trouble with that many words.
            • My work accounts get the bare minimum that complies with whichever rules the admins came up with. Numbers, special characters and mixed capitalization? No thirty letter phrase for you, then; you’ll get the minimum eight characters so I have a chance of memorizing the thing. Regular password changes? Great, now the last two chargers are going to be incrementing digits, just like for everyone else.

            There’s a reason why experts these days argue against anything but minimum length restrictions.

          • ゴン太@mander.xyz
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            1 year ago

            You can even make a complete sentence that makes sense with symbols and numbers.

            “Ronaldo doesn’t grill 76 Canadian Tacos.”

            Or whatever

      • djdadi@lemmy.world
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        1 year ago

        Not 4 of them in a row. Keep in mind the attacker doesn’t know " look for exactly 4 words"

        • Killing_Spark@feddit.de
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          1 year ago

          That’s just security by obscurity. It’s one other strategy of choosing passwords that a bruteforce attack is going to try if it gets popular

          • lolcatnip@reddthat.com
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            1 year ago

            That’s not what security by obscurity means. And going by your definition, all passwords are security by obscurity.

            • Killing_Spark@feddit.de
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              1 year ago

              If your strategy is to just use dictionary words your password will have little entropy and even less so if you use grammatically correct sentences. If the attacker knows this is your strategy of choosing passwords cracking one is way easier than cracking a password that has the same length but consists of randomly chosen characters.

              Your password is only safe because the attacker doesn’t know your strategy of choosing the password which forces him to use inefficient methods of cracking it, while there would be a more efficient way if he knew the strategy you used. Which is security by obscurity.

    • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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      1 year ago

      I prefer picking a sentence or so that has meaning to me, using the first letters, and then adjusting for numbers/symbols. So if I wanted to make that a pw, it’d be 1ppa505thm2m,utfl,atafn/5. -looks completely unintelligible, but as long as you can remember the sentence and have some ideas of how you would have encoded it, easy enough to remember/recreate.

        • Ookami38@sh.itjust.works
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          1 year ago

          It’s as easy to remember a bunch of those as it is remembering 4 random words with no association, I think. And besides, just use that for the big, important, pws like your pw manager.