You're assuming that a) a passphrase is acceptable to the system/app and b) that people can competently pick words for a passphrase.
That damn XKCD is overly simplified at best. I really wish people would stop linking to it.
That damn XKCD is overly simplified at best. I really wish people would stop linking to it.
Like, if I go "street bologna drawer sunset fang", did I do well?
Other common methods include appending a particular character to each word or alternate words...creating a pattern of sort, but this again makes it difficult to remember, which was the reason why we preferred passphrases instead of passwords in first place.
In English. Not all books in all languages ever published are "somewhere out there".
I mean, they mostly are or can be. What's the point on relying on "nobody happened to catalog the book I copied my passphrase from"? Are you going to check every week that nobody uploaded it to an archive site?
There's easier schemes that don't rely on that.
It's unlikely it will be done for a lot of languages.
> There's easier schemes that don't rely on that.
Remembering random words is hard. This is how we got into this in the first place.
It's really not. You just make a story out of it. My memory is quite crap, I'm still able to remember the ~3 passphrases I actually need, and I'm able to rotate them as required.
Some things that are obviously good (you can calculate the entropy easily): diceware style schemes, generated with dice or a secure random generator.
Anything in the middle it's quite hard to say. Humans are really bad at being random, so words you pick out of your head I'd be fairly suspicious of. But it's hard to prove it's a bad idea.
From a dictionary/rainbow table perspective I'm curious how they would know to include the following in their lookup tables before going fill number crunching mode:
TO be or NOT two be - that is the question!!!!!!!!!!7872665398
1) the choice of quote. Say that's in the top ten quotes ever, so something like 3 or so bits of entropy.
2) the modifications and additions to the quote. Really depends what the scheme is, but few bits for which words are capitalized (~4), few bits for where the hyphen is (~3), few bits for how many bangs (~4), and a bunch of bits for which number goes on the end, (~30ish). Some bits to account for the scheme itself and its choices too, but I don't know how to put a number on that.
Do you see how little is actually coming from the quote? Your passphrase might as well just be "95!!!!78726653980" and if anything that's _easier_ to remember.
Compare against something like a diceware passphrase. _All_ of the entropy comes from the passphrase part, the part that's easy to remember and trivial to calculate how secure it is.
So a quote is bad because you can _make_ it secure, but you making it secure is just throwing crap at it until it's no longer functionally a quote in any real way. It's secure the same way a blank password is.
Even for badly pw parts which could traced back to me. Let’s say I use my girlfriends name, surname and birthdate. If someone targets me directly, definitely a bad idea. For a random bruteforcer or even a dictionary attack with rockyou.txt, as an example, it wouldn't change a thing.
Or do I miss something here?
Good question. 3 bits is based on the part I mentioned where "to be or not to be" is one of the top 10 quotes. log(10) is about 3. The reasoning for this is that this quote is going to be in a "dictionary" your attacker has. 10 is probably a bit unfair on my part, because an attacker is probably really going to be guessing from a larger pool of quotes, but it ends up not mattering _too_ much. If their pool of quotes is 1000 long, that's more like 10 bits of entropy (still far, far too little on its own).
> Are the cracking algorithms so good that they know to try "or not to be" after they get to "to be". Also, as far as I remember you can't get a "you are partially there" result. Either you get the password or not. So they wouldn't know that "to be" are the first five chars.
Yeah, it's not based on anything like this. Assuming whoever implemented the password input (bitwarden in this case) isn't _maliciously_ incompetent, an attacker would get no information from a partially-correct password guess.
> Even for badly pw parts which could traced back to me. Let’s say I use my girlfriends name, surname and birthdate. If someone targets me directly, definitely a bad idea. For a random bruteforcer or even a dictionary attack with rockyou.txt, as an example, it wouldn't change a thing.
This is not completely wrong, but somewhat incomplete. Names and birthdates/years (or dates in general) are both really common parts of passwords. So an attacker will have a dictionary of common names (or ~all names, there's not that many of us), and every date that's possible to be important to someone.
So that already reduces the entropy a lot. And yeah it's bad enough if someone targets you directly that it's just a horrible idea.
The other problem with schemes like this: if you're using a password of that form, you're probably reusing it multiple places. This allows any site you have an account at to trivially access any _other_ place you have an account at. Really, really bad news.
...and probably how they extend their search patterns.
P.s.: I wouldn't use the pattern in my example... :-)