Sunday, January 15, 2012

Password security

If you' ever wondered how secure the password you're using is, just plug it in here and the site will calculate how long it would take for a typical PC to try to crack your code.

If nothing else, it's a good way to indicate how adding variety and especially length to a password can make it very difficult to break.

4 comments:

Jonw said...

Neat. And interesting. My 'standard' password has 4 numbers, 4 letters and a punctuation mark (not in that order) and the site said it would take about 2 days to crack it. I then tried a simple 5-letter word with four digits after it, and the site said it would take about 4 days to crack that. I would have thought a dictionary word with 4 digits behind it would be much easier to crack than my gibberish one with punctuation.

Karl Plesz said...

That is very interesting. Your observation piqued my interest, so I tried a random 9 character number-letter-symbol password and got a 108 day crack count. Maybe part of the combination of numbers, letters and symbols in your password is a known 'substitute' code for a dictionary word. For example, 3n1gm4 is barely more secure than enigma. I don't know. Most 9 digit combinations I tried that included at least one symbol had a crack count of 108.

Jon said...

Not sure why I came up as 'unknown' previously.

So...something like this 39duwq!50 has 108 day estimate, but 31ujet!6 has a 2 day estimate. Experimentation shows that it is the one extra digit that does it. If I change 31ujet!60 to 31ujet!62, it goes back to 108 days.

I'm not sure why or how that estimate is arrived at...

Karl Plesz said...

Must be the 'new math'....