Almost one in 10 people use the same four-digit PIN
abc.net.au
abc.net.au
Case in point: I had a unit at a mini-storage place once. And you needed a 4 digit PIN to get through the gate. And I forgot the PIN I used. I was sitting at the gate for a minute, staring at the keypad and realized "wait... hundreds of people have PINs in this system and the system doesn't care which one you use". So I just needed a PIN that somebody used. So I started with years that would have been reasonable birth years for an average adult at that time and starting going up. I think it took about 6 tries to find a valid PIN.
Now granted, this is different than trying to brute force a specific person's PIN. But even then, I expect that in many cases an informed search will crack it a lot faster than a purely sequential search or a random search. Using common birth years, well known numbers like "5150", "1234", "4321", etc. is probably going to work a lot of times.
When Eddie took the rights with him to Fender and they made the EVH 5150 (another fantastic amp), Peavey renamed this line to the 6505 series, so there you have another four-digit code to use.
M1 is - I think - the form they have to fill out to put you on a temporary hold.
Poster: "I was ripping my dirt bike out in the snow and got pulled over!"
Commenter 1: "What for?"
Commenter 2: "5150."
Barcroft Station in California (elevation 3800 m) has house number 5150 over the door. You'd have to be crazy to want to work there.
"How about (digits)?"
"You can't use that one. Someone else has already chosen that."
"Wait, now I know someone else's PIN code. I could use that and it'd be logged under their name."
“Which password?”
“Any password.”
“Hunter2”
“Welcome!”
*
As a memory rule, astrisk looks like a star, asteriskos means ”little star” in greek and is related to asterology.
Every security mechanism is breakable with enough budget
A entrance to a mini-storage place is probably OK to be weak. Presumably, you are required to have a proper lock on your own unit. Likewise, the PIN is generally the 2nd factor (along with "something you have") for important things. I'm OK with the convenience of having only a 4 digit PIN on my ATM card since I can reasonably protect & deactivate the card. If someone forces me to enter my pin under duress, it doesn't really matter how many digits it is.
You'd like the entrance to be strong, because access to the entrance grants you secluded access to all the units, and angle grinders beat locks in seconds, proper locks in just a few more seconds.
Of course, cars beat entrance gates pretty easily too.
Or do you mean they might prevent theft? Or deter it? It is my experience that they are pretty useless at both.
On that note, I don't think the absence of a super strong lock on the front door of a storage place invites criminals. I live near open air storage facilities where anyone can just walk up to the units, like they're walking by cars on the street or in a parking lot. Thefts from storage units are just not big enough of an issue to require additional measures.
In my mother tongue there's a saying that that roughly translates to "The lock on the door isn't there to keep you out. It's there to communicate that you're not wanted there."
But this is coming from a culture that's rather communal where shared property is often the default.
If the pin is chosen randomly with a uniform distribution over the 0000 to 9999 range, then the average brute force search will probe 5000.5 combinations.
I'm sure there's an optimal sequence of keypresses that tests all 10000 codes in something like 30,000 keypresses rather than the naive 40,000.
This made me uncomfortable when I was selling a house, so naturally I wrote some code to generate a string of digits that would cover the full solution space most efficiently.
Armed with this "master key", I had the lockbox open in negligible time. Honestly I think it was just a few minutes, and I was about halfway through the string.
This let me put the key out only when a showing was happening, and I brought the lockbox to the closing, which baffled the real estate agent.
https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/De_Bruijn_sequence
It seems that you can do it in 10003 key presses. Calculation for this this exact example is in the Wikipedia page.
I can't think of the PIN 1234 without immediately thinking of Dark Helmet:
"So the combination is one, two, three, four, five? That's the stupidest combination I ever heard in my life! That's the kind of thing an idiot would have on his luggage!" https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7rSmMm-7SVA
They could have added grid-lines to reveal this information, for example.
I suspect this is leading zero bias: a leading zero is not meaningful mathematically and we tend to drop it. The exceptions are dates. The day first block doesn't extend vertically into an unused area but the month first one drops off a cliff around 32 because no month has 32 days.
Most common PIN codes (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=40359736 - May 2024 (88 comments)
PIN number analysis (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=17670173 - Aug 2018 (72 comments)
Statistical Analysis of PIN Numbers (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11365962 - March 2016 (1 comment)
The 20 most common PIN numbers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11230045 - March 2016 (1 comment)
PIN analysis (2012) - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=11228319 - March 2016 (1 comment)
PIN number analysis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=5124024 - Jan 2013 (82 comments)
PIN Number Analysis - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4654337 - Oct 2012 (2 comments)
Analysis of bank PIN numbers - https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=4535417 - Sept 2012 (111 comments)
We've replaced password sharing with PIN sharing.
https://www.reddit.com/r/dataisbeautiful/comments/1cn7l7r/oc...
Also consider this scene from Trainspotting 2: https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=2EQCpQbUrzI :)
True story: friend had a bank (in the 1990s) randomly generate a PIN of 2222 for him. He got it reset.
Four digit PINs are a fine solution in many contexts.
A bigger problem is always going all in nuclear when it comes to security. If the solution is impossible to use, no one gives a shit about security.
Card issuers need to stop being lazy because they have a monopoly and innovate a bit.
(Or I suppose that just reinforces the point: most people are setting first 2 digits of the 6 digit pin to "00", essentially, although now I wonder if a phone accepts 001234 and 1234 as equivalent. Is it a string, or an int? I'd presume the former…)
“$10.77. Same as my PIN number.”
A clickable version of the original heatmap
Side note; I’m surprised 6969 is not more popular :)
Loved the visualisation and the fact that 2902/0229 are noticeably lighter than surroundings.
The account number is the unique identifier assigned by the bank. Your card is the physical "key" (password) to said account, and the PIN is your self chosen identifier (username).
Think of it this way: I can tell you my pin number and my bank account number all day long, it doesn't matter if you don't have my card. But if you had my card, you'd have a reasonable shot at guessing the PIN and gaining access. The card is the password.
Despite the misnomer, a PIN can't really be an identifier if you and I have the same one.
Sure it can, the namespace is just within your account.
I am logging into account X (account number) as Person Y (PIN) with authorization Z (card)
A PIN is a password, not a username.
Which is no longer true for EMV cards, though. There, the chip contains some additional data which cannot be easily copied and which helps identify the card as a bona fide real card issued by a bank.
https://www.emv-connection.com/contact-chip-card-online-auth... (there's also some alternative authentication method that would work offline, i.e. just between the card and the payment terminal)
Or more like PIN is that password, and the card is the token.
Username and password are both something you know, so they count as just one factor. A card on the other hand is something you have, so combined with the PIN that's two factors.
"1-1-1-uh-1!"
If you'll excuse me, I need to go fight some windmills.
I like that.
Or just the straight acronym of PAIN?
0. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Numeronym
printf "\n%s\t%s\n\n" $(uname) $SHELL; wrd="$(pbpaste | tr -d '\n')"; printf "%s%s%s\n" "$(echo "$wrd" | sed 's;^\(.\).*$;\1;')" "$(expr $(pbpaste | wc -m | tr -d ' ') - 2)" "$(echo "$wrd" | sed 's;^.*\(.\)$;\1;')"
Darwin /bin/zsh
P43rNumbers might be represented by numerals, but that doesn't mean every string of numerals is a number. If you need to know the difference, ask yourself if you'd ever do math with it, (add to it, subtract from it) if only principle.
- a figure or group of figures used to identify someone or something (Oxford dictionary)
- a numeral or combination of numerals or other symbols used to identify or designate (Merriam Webster's dictionary)