Security....

Jim Higson jh at 333.org
Wed Oct 27 16:13:38 UTC 2004


> Given enough time brute force attempts will work.  Period.

Technically, yes, but I'll probably be dead by the time they do!

Assume passwords are made of letters of both case and numbers, and are always 
8 chars long. Of course, in reality there are more than 62 chars (IMO it's 
always a good idea to have puncuation in a password)

That's 62^8 possible passwords, or about 2.2*10^14

So at 1 try per second (unrealistically fast I'd say for ssh) that's 7 million 
years (give or take a millenia or two) to try the whole set.

Or, to put it another way, if I get one brute force crack attempt per second 
for a whole year there's a one in seven million chance they'd gain access.

To be honest, that's ok with me :)
--
Jim




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