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submitted 8 months ago by [email protected] to c/[email protected]
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[-] [email protected] 59 points 8 months ago

I’ll bite. Serious answer.

If your password is required to only be a number, it has the smallest “girth” possible at only 10 possibilities for a length of one.

If your password is required to only be a letter, it has more “girth” at only 26 possibilities for a length of one.

If your password is required to only be a symbol, it’s probably about the same “girth” as letters.

You could make the girth increase on your one-character password by requiring it to be any of those above, but that’s still just about 60 options.

But length increases the security of a password exponentially. So if your password is required to be two numbers, you’re already of 100 options. Require only one more digit, and you’re at 1000, even with only ten choices per digit.

So girth is far less important than length when it comes to passwords.

[-] [email protected] 23 points 8 months ago

Oh, and making the font bigger has no effect.

[-] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

Depends if font size is also counted as the password

[-] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Username: lemmycommenter

Password: p@sswerd

Edit: was trying to do something funny but lemmy removes css style tags from comments I guess

[-] [email protected] 4 points 8 months ago

It makes me feel like a big man, though :(

[-] [email protected] 2 points 8 months ago

That’s the equivalent of making your pickup truck bigger.

[-] [email protected] 1 points 8 months ago

I was thinking trimming and a good unsticking before the reveal

[-] [email protected] 12 points 8 months ago* (last edited 8 months ago)

Yeah, but counterpoint

60^10 = 6e17

10^10 = 1e10

That's 60 million times more options. So yeah, girth matters.

[-] [email protected] 7 points 8 months ago

Exactly what I was thinking. Girth is just the number of possible characters. A very crude measure of password strength could thus be length x girth.

this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
319 points (97.6% liked)

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