Just remember "Simpsons Purple Monkey Dishwasher" and "7418". You're probably never going to forget that and I just tossed it into a password strength tester and it said it would take about 46 billion years to randomly guess it.

[–] LwL@lemmy.world 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago) (1 children)

If the structure of it is known it becomes much faster. Word+single digit^4 isn't all that hard.

For the vast majority of purposes, it'll be fine. And certainly as long as that particular structure isn't commonplace, it won't be easy to guess anyway. But password strength testers don't consider that - guessing "aaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaaa" randomly also takes billions of years, so they can give a bit of a sense of false security.

[–] Kramt@lemmy.world 3 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Eh it's still pretty hard.

If we check the numbers of English words from https://www.merriam-webster.com/help/faq-how-many-english-words and take a conservative estimate of 400 000 at the bottom of the page.

That means with the exact format of (word)(number)- 4 times has (without repeating words) 400000*9*399999*9*399998*9*399997*9 = 167957820891293697014400000 combinations. https://www.wolframalpha.com/input?i=400000939999893999979399996*9

The fastest super computer at the moment apparently sits at 1.1 quintillion Hz. Or 1.1 billion billion.

If that computer could make 1 guess every clock cycle it would still take it over 4 years (167957820891293697014400000 / 1.1quintillion = ~52 months ) to run through all possibilities.

Now that is a very fast computer, and we haven't included the possibility of various numbers of words, different delimiter, or where and how often numbers appear. So unless you've really pissed off the US gov I don't think you have to worry about it.

There's a reason passphrases are the currently recommended way to generate secure passwords that are hard to guess but easy to memorize/type in.

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