this post was submitted on 05 Apr 2024
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Fun fact: it would take about 37 billion years on average (at current (known) tech) to brute force a 16 character alphanumeric password which uses uppercase ie. using at least one of each of a-z,A-Z,0-9
Adding special characters would not make it easier. A trillion years seems like a long time. (Unless your password is ThisIs4Password!)
https://www.komando.com/wp-content/uploads/2021/03/Passwords-chart-970x510.jpg
Also, online logins should lock you out temporarily after a few failed attempts anyway, making brute force a complete non issue.
Also also, if you're going to try to brute force someones pw, you would just look up the requirements beforehand anyway.
If you brute force using single iterations of all possible combinations sure. But people don't do that. They use fully readable passwords and letter substitutions. This makes dictionary attacks viable. There are a known number of readable words and phonetic combinations that are significantly easier to brute force. And also the vast majority of numbers are also guessable because most numbers are dates. Series of 2 or 4 or 8 numbers to form important dates means there are lots of numbers between 1940-2024. People don't usually unconditionally random alphanumeric passwords. Therefore peoples passwords will never be fully secure against sufficiently advanced brute force methods.
I originally included the words "assuming random" to the post. Why I removed it? I guess for dramatic effect. You are correct. Permutations of dictionary words are relatively trivial for a decent program. But, increasing the length and the addition of special characters adds a nontrivial exponential increase in time, wouldn't it?