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A related measure is the base-2 logarithm of the number of guesses needed to find the password with certainty, which is commonly referred to as the "bits of entropy". [9] A password with 42 bits of entropy would be as strong as a string of 42 bits chosen randomly, for example by a fair coin toss.
The guessability is not the same as the entropy. "dog" is a high entropy password if you consider that to be three characters taken from the whole Unicode character set. The entropy of XKCD-style passwords is reduced if users, by habit, attempt to make grammatical sentence fragments out of the four words and if the attackers take this into account.
Adding a number and/or special character to a password might thwart some simple dictionary attacks. However, common words should still be avoided to the simplicity of automated brute force testing of well known munged variations of the words. For example, the password "Butterfly" could be munged in the following ways:
A strong password is your first line of defense against intruders and imposters. Here are some helpful tips on creating a secure password so you can make sure your information remains safe. Create a strong password • Use unique words - Don't use obvious words like "password". • Have 12 or more characters - Longer passwords are more secure.
The salt and hash are then stored in the database. To later test if a password a user enters is correct, the same process can be performed on it (appending that user's salt to the password and calculating the resultant hash): if the result does not match the stored hash, it could not have been the correct password that was entered.
The above calculations of the Diceware algorithm's entropy assume that, as recommended by Diceware's author, each word is separated by a space. If, instead, words are simply concatenated, the calculated entropy is slightly reduced due to redundancy; for example, the three-word Diceware phrases "in put clammy" and "input clam my" become ...
The Worst Passwords List is an annual list of the 25 most common passwords from each year as produced by internet security firm SplashData. [4] Since 2011, the firm has published the list based on data examined from millions of passwords leaked in data breaches, mostly in North America and Western Europe, over each year.
Enjoy a classic game of Hearts and watch out for the Queen of Spades!