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Comment by philliphaydon | Hacker News Reader

If my password was typed in Chinese would that make it hard to crack?? Or would it just result in collisions?

If the attacker had zero knolwedge of this they would have to rely on random collisions. On the other hand, there are about 5000 commonly used Chinese characters (estimates will vary) so entropy is going to be fairly high if they knew.

The real issue is how different OS and applications handle character encoding and KDF. A good example is WinRAR which does not allow full width CJK characters to be typed in the password field of its UI but one can copy and paste in anything and it will be accepted. Decryption will work on some OS/version combinations but not all.

There are a lot of hackers who know Chinese, so it probably isn't gaining you any ground. See diceware.com for how to generate strong passwords (in many different languages). Also, use a password manager with a password generator for less sensitive accounts and so that you aren't reusing passwords.

I already use 1Password with min 20 characters, unless the site has a length limit ><

I was more curious about extending the characters past alpha numeric / special characters, to include Chinese characters as well. That would open up the number of characters required to brute force and probably result in relying on a collision. Until technology catches up.

I've been wishing to set my passwords in Japanese for a very long time. Too many things reject them, or don't even allow to type them.

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