Mathematics makes strong case that “snoopy2” can be just fine as a password

arstechnica.com

8 pointsmarkmassie2 comments

This article isn't very clear to me but I think it's suggesting that people use something like "googlemail-snoopy2" as a password rather than just snoopy2.

Any hacker or security researcher would say that a alphanumeric password under ~10 characters is not wise.

You don't know what kind of hashing websites are using, and rainbow tables exist for the common types.

IMO, the title of this article is irresponsible. A short common password is not a good idea, if mathematicians suggest otherwise then they are wrong.

Combining the login process with 2-way auth might be a different story though. I guess technically a password isn't even needed with 2-way auth, but it's good to have.

I don't think that's what it's saying at all. To me, it reads as though it's basically saying "one person can't remember really secure passwords for every site, so use good passwords for important sites, and bad passwords for unimportant sites".

It actually talks about choosing how secure to make a password based on importance and "the probability a given account password will be compromised", but I don't really see how users are going to evaluate the latter.

Reply on news.ycombinator.com