The attacker doesn't know how long the password is, nor anything about what it might look like. The only thing an attacker can know is whether a password guess was an exact match. The old expression “Close only counts in horseshoes and hand grenades” applies here. But that doesn't matter, because the attacker is totally blind to the way your passwords look. correct!īut wouldn't something like “D0g” be in a dictionary, even with the 'o' being a zero? But as we see now, when the only available attack is guessing, that long-standing common wisdom. Virtually everyone has always believed or been told that passwords derived their strength from having “high entropy”. If so, you'll have noticed that the first, stronger password has much less entropy than the second (weaker) password.
#ENTROPY CALCULATOR DOWNLOAD#
You may download a shortened, 37-minute, excerpted version presenting the padded password and Haystack calculator concepts:ĮNTROPY: If you are mathematically inclined, or if you have some security knowledge and training, you may be familiar with the idea of the “entropy” or the randomness and unpredictability of data. On June 1st, Leo Laporte and I recorded our weekly Security Now! podcast as part of Leo's (This Week in Tech) audio and video podcasting network. The whole point of using padded passwords is to adopt a much more you-friendly approach to password design. The calculator then puts the resulting large numbers (with lots of digits or large powers of ten) into a real world context of the time that would be required (assuming differing search speeds) to exhaustively search every password up through that length, assuming the use of the chosen alphabet.Īnswering that question is the reason this page exists. This calculator is designed to help users understand how many passwords can be created from different combinations of character sets (lowercase only, mixed case, with or without digits and special characters, etc.) and password lengths. So what IS the “Search Space Calculator” ?
#ENTROPY CALCULATOR CRACKER#
And no password cracker would wait 17.33 centuries before checking to see whether “Password” is the magic phrase. Yet the Search Space Calculator above shows the time to search for those two passwords online (assuming a very fast online rate of 1,000 guesses per second) as 18.52 minutes and 17.33 centuries respectively! If “123456” is the first password that's guessed, that wouldn't take 18.52 minutes. The #1 most commonly used password is “123456”, and the 4th most common is “Password.” So any password attacker and cracker would try those two passwords immediately.
Since it could be easily confused for one, it is very important for you to understand what it is, and what it isn't: IMPORTANT!!! What this calculator is NOT. Simplicity and power of the “ Password Haystacks” concept. The prestigious “ Consumer Reports” has also picked up on the (The Haystack Calculator has been viewed 8,726,146 times since its publication.) Limited to, at most, a few hundred guesses per second. Note that typical attacks will be online password guessing Los Angeles' KABC-TV produced a terrific & succinct twoĪnd a half minute explanation of the Password HaystacksĬoncept: Click this link to view their quick introduction. The Password Haystack Concept in 150 Seconds So, to activate the cool calculator below, you must ENABLE the JavaScript interpreter built into your web browser. With JavaScript, everything stays in your browser where it belongs and is never sent anywhere for any purpose. If your test passwords were sent back to GRC for server-side analysis, it would not only be much slower and more cumbersome, but also inherently open to privacy questioning. While we have bent over backwards to make GRC's many other site features completely functional without any client-side JavaScript (mostly to thumb our nose at the rest of the world to show that it can be done) the highly interactive nature of this page really screams out for a JavaScript solution.īut also, performing this page's calculations with client-side JavaScript is the only way to provide you with privacy.
(Because we DON'T have JavaScript)If you are reading this, your browser's built-in JavaScript interpreter is disabled and is thus (not surprisingly) unable to interpret JavaScript.
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