I'm pretty sure even that will be beyond his worry http://www.bbc.com/future/story/2014...the-far-future

The far far future may not be that far if you have all the asic miners in the world creating hash tables for you. Not that they are, but you've got to wonder.

One of the assumptions people are making to illustrate that it's next to impossible to crack a password, is that the hash is seeded with a truely random number.

Usually they aren't. Truely random numbers are extremely difficult to come by, and this is an achilles heel for all algorithms.

Not really.

Hashes aren't seeded, they are salted. Each piece of data will always generate the same hash with the same salt, that's the whole point of hashing. The strength of a hash lies in the non-reversible nature of the algorithm. No entropy or randomness is required.

The reason salts are used is to prevent direct comparison with existing hashes. If I have a list of passwords and their corresponding hash values in a file, and I later come across the password hash "b036d59cb7f7687a68ba8490b8f57387c785f861" and it turns out it's listed in that file, I will instantly know the corresponding password. If salts are used, one would need one list of passwords and hashes for each possible salt value.

A salt is generated when a password is created or changed and a new hash needs to be generated, and that's an event that happens sufficiently rarely that the accuracy of random generators isn't much of an issue.

But when it comes to generating session keys for symmetric encryption, or key pairs for asymmetric encryption, the randomness of the PRNG is a huge issue. This can be a major problem on embedded systems that need to generate keys when booted for the very first time, since there may not be many sources of entropy available at that time.

No - it just makes the table much bigger.

damn ! i can see the rainbows ! (0_0)

Nothing is impossible. Keep changing your passwords and make sure you mix up all the upper and lower letters and symbols when you setup new passwords.

That says it all.

So much bigger as to render the attack implausible, but not impossible.

Exactly. This was the original reason cracking a DES hash was considered "impossible" in the 70s. The rainbow table was something on the order of 8GB. The larger disk sizes were 300MB. Now disk sizes are 3-5 TB.. but the rainbow tables are in the petabyte range (if not exabyte).. thus making them implausable.

Another attack is the parallel search - if you have a million CPUs to throw at the problem... you likely won't need to keep the results except from the single one that succeeded. But more likely is that there would be a hybrid approach - a lot of different rainbow tables to narrow the search down, then a bunch of CPUS to throw at the remainder.

Choosing a Secure Password (good article by Bruce Schneier)

As stated in the articles, there is a delicate balance between a good password and a password you can remember.

I say don't worry too much about entropy. Hackers typically don't use entropy-based methods to crack. They use dictionaries, because people use words as passwords.

The password should NOT be a common word, and should include numbers. It should also be easy to remember or reproduce by the user.

EDIT:
I'm wondering about Schneider's advice here:
Although 90 days is a bit excessive, I think you should change your password once in a while, like every 6 mo - 1 year.

I really dislike the secret questions, it all sounds like a method of rather easily bypassing your password using personal info. You know what I do ? I put in unrelated information into there.

Write passwords on a piece of paper ? Um, no. I'm not doing that. A password safe was a much better idea.

Hello

Use a strong password, never go online with your machine, never install software on your machine that is not known to be safe, and never allow anyone else direct access to your computer. Do those things and you should be good to go, but you never know these days, so no guarantees. For many people, a strong password along with a firewall and perhaps some security software and a bit of common sense in computing is all they use. They then go forward hoping for the best.

Either way, let us know what you end up doing to protect yourself, and how it works out for you.

Choice of a strong password is actually a very difficult thing for a human to do. Humans tend to be predictable in how we use word and digit combinations, which allows password cracking to be very effective, despite the theoretically large entropy space.
I found this to be a very informative article. http://arstechnica.com/security/2013...r-passwords/1/

[edit]My apologies, just realised that this article is linked in the Bruce Schneier article that Beryllos linked in post #26.[/edit]