Is leetspeak password secure?
Unfortunately, leetspeak passwords are far from secure. For years, password cracking applications have been able to recognize most character substitutions, decipher the underlying word, and crack the password.
What is simple character substitution?
Character substitution is where you take a lowercase dictionary word and substitute in special characters, numbers and uppercase letters to make them more complex. Examples of common substitutions are: $, S or 5 for s. 1, I or ! for i.
Are there any passwords with no dictionary word?
In particular, the “no dictionary word” requirement is causing people frustration, as I disallow the classic leetspeak passwords such as XKCD’s famous Tr0ub4dor&3. (For those curious, I run the proposed password through a leetspeak permutation translator (including dropping the char) and then compare each permutation against a dictionary)
How many random characters are too weak for a password?
If six random characters is too weak, you should disallow “leetspeak” dictionary passwords. To be fully thorough, you may also want a large dictionary so you can count words as I have, otherwise a password like presidentclinton (33.22 bits, 5 chars, lower in reality due to being related) would be accepted by your system.
What does Dictionary mean in terms of password cracking?
First and foremost, realize that when we’re talking about password cracking, “dictionary” means a list of base password candidates, which can be used both by themselves, or – much more fruitfully – as part of a rules based attack. The Hashcat forum has a list of wordlist locations.
Which is larger the exponent or the length of a password?
As you might know, changing the exponent (the length) makes the number much larger than changing the base (complexity). For example, a random password using 6 characters, consisting of a-z, A-Z, and 0-9, has a complexity of 62 (26 + 26 + 10) and a length of 6, making 62^6= ~56 billion possible passwords.