LastPass users are once again being warned about stolen personal data, though this time the breach happened through one of the company’s outside partners.
You can actually generate high entropy passphrases by chaining random words together. You just need to make sure the phrases are actually random and not just whatever comes to your head at the moment.
Naturally, words help with memorization, but memorizing hundreds of these is impractical at best, especially because long-term memory for infrequently used accounts is subject to “bit rot”.
How many characters are we talking, though? I’ve had passwords as limiting as 16 characters for some services (unfortunately)… that seems small to me for generating real randomness with passphrases.
That said, fair enough, but as someone who has administered a network before, I would never, ever want my users relying on their brain… the security from a pass manager is practically going to be way better than the standard practices of an average user without one. IMO.
The entropy stems from the words, not characters. With random words and no repetition, you have C(n, k) combinationsP(n, k) permutations (or n^k with repetition), where n is your dictionary size and k is the number of words you chain together. These passwords tend to be longer, but not by much. A big enough dictionary can yield some pretty high entropy with only a few words.
I’ve had passwords as limiting as 16 characters for some services (unfortunately)…
16 characters is hardly enough for random characters unless you include Unicode (which rarely works for those same services that usually have shitty implementations).
Not much can be done there, sadly. You’re lucky if they even hash their passwords anyway - you’ll probably just get your password emailed to you if you click “forgot password” like it’s 2003.
I would never, ever want my users relying on their brain…
I never would either. People should just use a password manager. I was just mentioning an alternative that generated more memorable passphrases, but I wouldn’t advocate for it over random high-entropy strings saved in a password manager.
You can actually generate high entropy passphrases by chaining random words together. You just need to make sure the phrases are actually random and not just whatever comes to your head at the moment.
Naturally, words help with memorization, but memorizing hundreds of these is impractical at best, especially because long-term memory for infrequently used accounts is subject to “bit rot”.
How many characters are we talking, though? I’ve had passwords as limiting as 16 characters for some services (unfortunately)… that seems small to me for generating real randomness with passphrases.
That said, fair enough, but as someone who has administered a network before, I would never, ever want my users relying on their brain… the security from a pass manager is practically going to be way better than the standard practices of an average user without one. IMO.
But hey, color me impressed, honestly.
The entropy stems from the words, not characters. With random words and no repetition, you have
C(n, k)combinationsP(n, k)permutations (orn^kwith repetition), wherenis your dictionary size andkis the number of words you chain together. These passwords tend to be longer, but not by much. A big enough dictionary can yield some pretty high entropy with only a few words.16 characters is hardly enough for random characters unless you include Unicode (which rarely works for those same services that usually have shitty implementations).
Not much can be done there, sadly. You’re lucky if they even hash their passwords anyway - you’ll probably just get your password emailed to you if you click “forgot password” like it’s 2003.
I never would either. People should just use a password manager. I was just mentioning an alternative that generated more memorable passphrases, but I wouldn’t advocate for it over random high-entropy strings saved in a password manager.
Yeah, I was particularly irked by that 16 limit I encountered the other day.
And I stand corrected, then, and color me impressed. I’ll look into doing this for those passwords I need to remember, like masters.
I also should correct myself - it’s not
C(n, k), it’sP(n, k)(which isn! / (n-k)!). It’s been a minute since I took a statistics class lol.In any case, it’s a lot of entropy with just a few words.