Search results
Results from the WOW.Com Content Network
Systems that use passwords for authentication must have some way to check any password entered to gain access. If the valid passwords are simply stored in a system file or database, an attacker who gains sufficient access to the system will obtain all user passwords, giving the attacker access to all accounts on the attacked system and possibly other systems where users employ the same or ...
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. Tools for password cracking use dictionary attacks, and the dictionary is an observation of cultural habits (common words and spellings).
Diceware is a method for creating passphrases, passwords, and other cryptographic variables using ordinary dice as a hardware random number generator. For each word in the passphrase, five rolls of a six-sided die are required. The numbers from 1 to 6 that come up in the rolls are assembled as a five-digit number, e.g. 43146. That number is ...
Any password generator is limited by the state space of the pseudo-random number generator used if it is based on one. Thus a password generated using a 32-bit generator is limited to 32 bits entropy, regardless of the number of characters the password contains. [citation needed]
Or in another way; it raises minimum-entropy value of the password set. At the same time it excludes only low-entropy sets (e.g. all lower or all upper case) so the maximum-entropy value passwords are unaffected. The overall result is to force an increase in the median/mean entropy of the password pool.
GRC's Password Haystacks has a pretty good explanation why password entropy is mostly based on length as well as a tool to estimate password entropy --193.29.76.37 09:58, 17 August 2011 (UTC) That's not disputed. What is disputed is that this comic strip has unique educational value that we couldn't include in the article body.
Get AOL Mail for FREE! Manage your email like never before with travel, photo & document views. Personalize your inbox with themes & tabs. You've Got Mail!
In cryptography, a salt is random data fed as an additional input to a one-way function that hashes data, a password or passphrase. [1] Salting helps defend against attacks that use precomputed tables (e.g. rainbow tables), by vastly growing the size of table needed for a successful attack.