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Are special characters in passwords more secure?
Truth: There’s a limit to how much security complex passwords can give you. To be fair, using mixed case, numbers and special characters makes the password much stronger than just using lowercase.
What characteristics make passwords more secure?
CHARACTERISTICS OF STRONG PASSWORDS
- At least 8 characters—the more characters, the better.
- A mixture of both uppercase and lowercase letters.
- A mixture of letters and numbers.
- Inclusion of at least one special character, e.g., ! @ # ? ]
Why do you have to use special characters for passwords?
It’s because if you don’t force people to use special characters, they likely won’t, the same being true of uppercase, and numbers. If you force some combination of these, then you will always increase entropy, because you’re increasing the number of characters that could possibly be in each character of your password.
Which is the best length for a password?
As long as a password isn’t easily guessable by other means (e.g. use of common words, username, repeating characters) length is your best friend for mitigating brute force attacks. Let’s consider passwords that only use lowercase letters. For an 8 character password, there are 26 8 possible passwords, which might seem like a large number.
Which is more secure a password or a passphrase?
Therefore, a lengthy list of easy-to-remember words or a passphrase could be actually more secure than a shorter list of random characters. Lengthy passwords made of actual words are definitely easier to remember and could help users manage them in more secure way.
Is it possible to lower the strength of a password?
If the numbers and special character are added in predictable ways, say at the beginning and end of the password, they could even lower password strength compared to an all letter random password of the same length. NIST Special Publication 800-63