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Massive data dump containing millions of passwords sparks security alert: Is your data safe? (www.techspot.com)

submitted 10 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]

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[–] [email protected] 4 points 10 months ago* (last edited 10 months ago)

For symmetric keys, since they cannot be weakened using quantum computing, their strength can be assessed by their bit-equivalent amount of entropy:

40 bit or less - easily breakable
64 bit - not so easy, but doable
128 bit or more - basically unbreakable

Those are equivalent to, respectively:

0-9 - 12, 19, 38 characters
a-z - 9, 14, 28 characters
a-z0-9 - 8, 12, 25 characters
A-Za-z0-9 - 7, 11, 22 characters
A-Za-z0-9+special - 7, 10, 21 characters

Moral of the story: drop the special characters, and even the numbers... and even the uppercase. A 30+ character long all-lowercase pass phrase, is already unbreakable.

Check @[email protected]:

finance-caffeine-utopia-redress ~~-unseen~~

...is already over 128 bits.

PS: Correct horse battery staple