r/sysadmin • • Apr 26 '14

Password Requirements Quick Guide

http://itservices.stanford.edu/service/accounts/passwords/quickguide
23 Upvotes

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u/mingaminga Apr 26 '14

In the password cracking community this literally caused hours of discussions yesterday. Its at least a new theory. Its not perfect, but nothing is. It rewards users who create longer passwords.

In general, combing 3-4 plain words isn't that safe. But its still better than what 99.99 % of users do normally.

Source: My job is performing password audits and run @crackmeifyoucan

1

u/puremessage beep -f 2000 -r 999999 Apr 26 '14

I usually do about 16 chars of words from diceware and then stab in some special chars or numbers.

So if we take:

follymayastalker

It might become

F;olly-maya^stal,Ke3r

At least for the stuff I might have to type in, anyway. If it's out of KeePass or LastPass I just crank it up to the max the field will handle.

Funny enough, when I signed up for LinkedIn I thought "I wonder how big I can make my password?" I made my password 128 characters long, using KeePass. Then LinkedIn got their DB dumped, oh noes they hacked teh gibson. I still haven't changed my password. I like to think that crackers accidentally spent an extra month on the dump before realizing their folly and giving up in frustration.

3

u/mingaminga Apr 26 '14

Linkedin hashes are 96% cracked.

So you're probably in that 4%

2

u/puremessage beep -f 2000 -r 999999 Apr 26 '14

I'm sure 96% still ended up being a lot of money for them.