this post was submitted on 23 Aug 2023
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Something to note here - with AI, if you’re using any sort of heuristic for your password, it’s pretty simple to work out a pretty good set of possibilities which makes brute force even easier and puts you at risk across the board.
Always come up with random passwords that are as random as possible. If there’s a path you took to get to a password, in theory it can be worked backward.
For example I know some people who only change a single letter when changing their passwords which is ultimately trivial to guess if the old password was compromised (hence the need to change the password or the need to proactively work against this possibility)
I wish more websites allowed random words as passwords instead of forcing numbers and special characters (but not THAT special character, you have to use one of the ones on this list).
People change their passwords by one letter or digit because they're tied to these restrictive formats. If 5-6 random words was the norm, people would update more than just one character when needing to change passwords.
"poison navy series ruler handshake papaya" is a fantastic password.
"Ilovemygrandkids!123" is a horrible password.
Just use a password manager and a unique, long, random generated password for every site. There's no need or reason to know the password to anything other than your password manager and your primary email.
in like a decade the use of a password manager will be a bad idea. i don't know how but it will be.
Hmm, a single point of access for every password you have? I don't see the problem...
The thing is the average person either can't or can't be bothered to remember even a dozen actually secure passwords, so they fall back to a couple of simple derivations of a common password, meaning each and every site a user signs up on represents an additional single point of failure.
That's a good point.
Lucky until we get actual quantum computing, it's not worth the years on a supercomputer to crack a single stolen set of encrypted passwords.
You know somebody has to link this.
https://xkcd.com/936/
That's why I use IncorrectBatteryHorseStaple
They'll never figure that one out
I see you. https://xkcd.com/936/
You just linked the same thing that the thing you responded to responded to had linked!
You immediately know that they're not handling your passwords correctly when they block certain characters.
Agreed! I also think that the next steps would be getting rid of the need for users to even know their own password and instead replace with other securities like biometrics (with sufficient permutations possible to match or exceed passwords) and a physical device or something else entirely that removes the need to let the user in on what the exact password is
I use a heuristic to update my main passwords. It's not a character but easily guessable if you see it in plaintext and now you've made me facepalm my actions.
I only use that for certain things because I use Google Oauth or Bitwarden for most things and you've just woken me up about what could be exposed.
The goal should usually be as random as possible, if it’s got a series of steps to create, they can be traced backward
Now the trick I’m not telling you is that randomness is hard to get because you need a sufficient amount of entropy (basically just means randomness, chaos, formally it’s how much uncertainty there is in the system) to ensure that it’s strong enough which can be challenging sometimes. For example, if your password is only 3 characters long and has 10 possibilities for each spot in the string, you’re only looking at 10^3 possibilities to guess accurately which is nothing to pcs and people with time on their hands haha
something I did before letting bitwarden take over my passwords, was using a phrase consisting of 2-3 words + a series of numbers and special characters. Safer than anyone I knew at the time's passwords. Admittedly it was not the most secure, as i only changed the beginning part of the 2-3 word phrase, and left the last word, numbers and symbols the same. So if one of those passwords were breached, it wouldn't be too difficult for AI to brute force the missing pieces. So yeah I don't do that anymore.
That's why correcthorsebatterystaple is the best way to do passwords imo, just 4 random words with a random special character dividing them and a random number tacked onto the end. Good luck brute forcing that or using AI to guess 4 randomly generated words in the correct order.
we were talking about password changes, not creation though
Guessing someone’s password with no prior history vs with an “averaged” prior history of the world/some large dataset are two different sized sets.
If you’ve got a feel for how the majority of people are changing their passwords, guessing those passwords is significantly easier when compared to traditional brute force
Edit:
Passphrases are fairly good too but I want to see some real word examples of AI trained on some password dumps to see how much better it performs in comparison to traditional brute force and through targeted info gathering. I’m curious to see if there’s any user friendly techniques that’d work against AI specifically and it’s ability to find patterns most people wouldn’t pick up on
I could explain in detaiI if that’s cool? I have a degree in computer Science and beginner level experience with making my own models from datasets (not my own but from various repos) and with other applications (LLM, image gen, and then some other miscellaneous stuff that’s not really important)
Otherwise I can try to find somethin for ya sure
I want to see a citation on that too, in particular the AI part as though it makes 'intuitive' sense it's good to see proof, but there's no need to be a dick.
You can look it up yourself, you’re an asshole and I have nothing to prove to you. It’s common knowledge that AI is trained on data sets to find common patterns amongst a large variety of other techniques and specificities to predict as accurately as possible.