Hacker Newsnew | past | comments | ask | show | jobs | submitlogin

That's a vulnerability for cyphers and has no application to modern password systems. If a password were all Ls up to the minimum then certainly that would be a bad idea, but having two Ls in a row because your password happens to contain or be a derivative of a word that has two Ls has no bearing on how secure the password is.

    sha256(LLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLLL+mysalt) = 57c70b4fddd06c94c9a7b41d9884591bb1d487fb78df723b11bc4892e879f46e
    sha256(LRpSdU$EnD1ZrJJ2QyVHPycN*DZtrHm&YdH%%28f4ih+mysalt) = 29cd0708db0fb7350e17349012a6e728b357ef733e85f401fc757e6565ef5e80
Neither of those hashes would give an attacker the slightest bit of insight into the user's password even if the attacker suspected the first letter of each were an L.


> having two Ls in a row ... has no bearing on how secure the password is.

At least some password cracking programs are built to anticipate human tendencies, which I would guess includes repeating characters. If I were designing a password cracker, I would target human-created passwords and not random passwords. For example, I would have the program guess 123456 before it guesses R%Vg9~\


The other complexity rules rule that out, though.

If I have a password 10 characters long with at least one uppercase, one lowercase, 1 digit, and 1 special character then having one of those repeated won't make it any less secure. Rigidly enforcing that rule doesn't make sense, it's saying that "R%Vg9~\LL" is less secure than "R%Vg9~\".




Guidelines | FAQ | Lists | API | Security | Legal | Apply to YC | Contact

Search: