Neither ZDNET nor the author are compensated for these independent reviews. This helps support our work, but does not affect what we cover or how, and it does not affect the price you pay. When you click through from our site to a retailer and buy a product or service, we may earn affiliate commissions. ![]() And we pore over customer reviews to find out what matters to real people who already own and use the products and services we’re assessing. We gather data from the best available sources, including vendor and retailer listings as well as other relevant and independent reviews sites. A strong chain link doesn’t prevent a weak one from snapping.ZDNET's recommendations are based on many hours of testing, research, and comparison shopping. While it sounds counter-intuitive, cracking passwords simply relies on the weakest link in a chain. The only strong password I need to memorize is the one that secures my 1Password data, and which is never typed in at any online site or used elsewhere. 1Password always leaves the database encrypted, and decrypts in its client software using the same technique employed by LastPass in its clients and on its server that create so much “work” (computational burden) that someone acquiring my password cache would take years or decades of dedicated work to crack. I use 1Password, and I store my database of password in Dropbox. But it’s more dangerous to have one strong one. I know it sounds awful and dangerous to have unique passwords that you aren’t memorizing. The salt prevents two identical passwords from producing the same stored result.) (The system uses salting, a random value added to a password, on top of hashing. The upgrade makes it impossible for a cracker who uses brute force on one stored password to use the same results to match identical plain-text passwords in other accounts. But if registered site visitors use the same password elsewhere, then we face the problem described above in the event of a breach. The old storage was fine, and the site has no personal or payment information. I just worked with one outfit for which I do some programming to migrate from an older to newer encrypted-storage methodology, prompted by an update to one module they’re using that allows for better methods. A targeted individual, combined with the password hints that LastPass stored, might be cracked before they can change her or his password, but brute force against all passwords will fail. There is nearly zero chance that passwords from its users will be recovered in bulk. LastPass had an account information breach, but assuming that their description and implementation of how they stored passwords is correct, There are some staggeringly positive examples of sites mitigating password theft. That’s because even if the crackers know three words are involved, the number of iterations to find them is still enormously high if the combination isn’t found in typical online texts-like webpages or books-in that language. But it’s very red in actual fact.Īs I’ve written about before, a set of a few words uncommonly found together and sufficiently long, like “Christmas penguin haircut” is many, many, many orders of magnitude harder to crack than or even “JWT74PV5JVaj”. Green? Yes, if you look at the quality bar. Thus, they type “Password” (upper and lower case) plus the first number on the keyboard, plus the key-cap of that number. Their tools know that people will add the least amount of complexity and the simplest choice needed. This increases the number of brute-force combinations that have to be tried, and thus are scored highly on the red-to-green quality bar.ĭespite the green bar, this is a terrible password.īut “Password1!” is very easy for a cracker to crack because they now walk down selective paths that are based on information derived from previous large-scale cracks. ![]() ![]() That’s because those features only analyze whether or not you’ve got enough differentiation (or “entropy”) in character choice-mixed case, numbers, and punctuation for instance. I spoke to a password and security researcher several months ago who noted that most of the sites that have detailed password requirements don’t really improve the strength of a password, even when the red bar that shows a bad password switches to green-including Apple’s own password-strength indicator. You’ve probably seen in analyses of cracked sites that many people’s passwords are “123456” or “password.” It should also be highly resistent to brute force. A strong password is one that can’t be guessed from details about you: it’s not a person’s name in your family, the name of a pet, a past or current address in some form, or the like.
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