AI cracks 51% of passwords in 1min | Hacker News Reader

AI cracks 51% of passwords in 1min

homesecurityheroes.com

10 pointslambersley7 comments

I definitely get the sense it’s not running its actual AI against what you type, but rather just counting the number of characters and comparing it to the chart below, which is of debatable accuracy.

A AI password cracker ? How is this different then a brute force attack ?

It's marketing BS (edit, that may be too harsh)

They do reference "passGan" which I assume is this, from 2017: https://github.com/brannondorsey/PassGAN

Paper is here https://arxiv.org/abs/1709.00440

They use "AI" to generate passwords that are more likely based on actual choices, like P@s5w0rd kind of stuff. The paper that is, I have no idea about the company.

It isn't. You could perhaps make an argument that it's more likely to try "likely" passwords first, which means it will find theoretically strong but predictable passwords faster but should actually take longer to crack unpredictable passwords.

And of course it's trained on password leaks... but so are the people who write password cracking algorithms.

Hmmm ... surely this is just statistical analysis sprinkled with magical marketing fairy dust: "[this] uses Generative Adversarial Network (GAN) to autonomously learn the distribution of real passwords from actual password leaks ... After training, GAN was able to leverage the acquired knowledge to create new sample passwords that follow the neural network distribution"

hmmm.. they don't seem to really explain the rules of the game here. Doesn't the length of time it takes to crack a password depend on the rate at which you are allowed to try different guesses at the password prompt, and whether or not you get locked out or penalized with delays after a certain number of wrong guesses?

When they say it takes 48 minutes to "crack" my password are they assuming some specific rate at whichever the system they are trying to log in to responds to failed login attempts?

All good, a derivative of my master password for my Bitwarden vault doesn't even completely fit in there and gives 7.23B years.

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