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FlippedBITS: Four Password Myths

In the course of writing “Take Control of Your Passwords,” I came across — and attempted to debunk — quite a few myths involving password security. Of course, I encourage you to buy the book to read about password problems and my recommended solutions in detail, but for this installment of FlippedBITS, I want to focus on four extremely common misconceptions about passwords, all of which can lead to dangerous behavior.

1: Nine Is Enough — I want to begin with a myth I propagated myself in my now-obsolete 2006 book “Take Control of Passwords in Mac OS X.” Although what I said in that book was reasonable based on the available data at the time, I grossly underestimated the rate of technological progress. So, I hereby retract and apologize for a particular piece of advice I gave back then: I said that if you chose a random 9-character password consisting of upper- and lowercase letters, digits, and punctuation, you’d be effectively safe from any attack, because it would take centuries, on average, for even a supercomputer to crack such a password by brute force.

Well, it turns out that I was off by a few orders of magnitude. Today, with off-the-shelf hardware and freely available cracking software, a nine-character password can be broken in a maximum of five and a half hours (that’s maximum, not minimum!). If your password contains nine or fewer characters, regardless of how random it may be, it’s about as unsafe as a Wi-Fi connection protected with WEP (which is to say, safe against only the most casual snooping).

If nine characters are too few these days, how long should a password be? I wish I could give you a straight answer, but the truth is “it depends.” For example, I could claim, with some justification, that a random 14-character password is effectively safe from brute-force attacks given today’s technology. But I’d have to qualify that in a few different ways.

First, I have no idea what tomorrow’s technology will look like. Maybe a few years from now, someone will develop a quantum computer that can crack any 14-character password in the blink of an eye. I don’t expect that to happen so soon, but I’d be foolish to bet against it.

Second, not all encryption techniques are equally secure. A password that’s protected with a weak encryption algorithm might be crackable in seconds, whereas the same password, encrypted with a better method, could thwart a brute-force attack for years. Related to this is that some password security systems put additional barriers in place to slow down the rate at which passwords can be guessed. Although these aren’t foolproof (as I discuss in a moment), they can, in certain situations, give a simple password much higher effective strength.

Third, length isn’t the only factor that affects a password’s strength. As illustrated brilliantly in the xkcd comic Password Strength, even a password consisting entirely of lowercase English words (such as correct horse battery staple) can be just as strong as a shorter but more random password with a mixed character set. That’s because a password’s entropy (a mathematical approximation of how hard the password is to guess) can come from length, character set complexity, randomness, or any combination of these. Higher-entropy passwords are more resistant to automated attacks, but there’s more than one path to entropy. (If you’d like
to test a given password’s entropy, there are many online tools that let you do so. I quite like the zxcvbn tool for this purpose.)

We can take some comfort in the fact that each additional character in a password increases its strength exponentially. So, if we were to restrict ourselves to just 26 lowercase letters, a 10-character password wouldn’t merely be 10 percent better than a 9-character password — it would be 26 times better! There are over 5 trillion possible passwords consisting of nine lowercase letters (26^9), but make it ten letters (26^10), and there are more than 141 trillion possibilities. That means a system that can crack a 9-character random password in 5.5 hours could take over 500 hours to crack a 10-character random password — a huge difference.

Even so, 500 hours is too little for my comfort. You could make that more than 500 years by choosing a 12-character password, which certainly seems safe enough for all practical purposes. But then, that’s what I thought about 9-character passwords seven years ago. So, when I suggest 14 as a safer number, I’m building in enough of a buffer to account for a few years of technological development, not in any way saying that such a password will in fact be uncrackable for the over 4,000 millennia it would take at today’s rate.

2: Old Tricks from Old Dogs — I’ve encountered quite a few people — including some major names in the Mac world you’d recognize — who have developed mnemonic techniques for creating and remembering passwords that they imagine to be quite strong. Although specifics vary, there tends to be a consistent element or easily constructed pattern in each password, along with some site-specific portion. For example, maybe I use zombieGooCats for Google and zombieAppCats for Apple. (In reality, most people I know who do this sort of thing have far more sophisticated techniques, but you get the general
idea.)

I myself once (cough) advocated such an approach, but I’ve since seen the light. The problem with all such tricks — and that also goes for “leet” or “1337” (replacing letters with similar-looking numbers), using patterns of keys on a keyboard, and so on — is that no matter how clever you think you are, hackers and their advanced cracking algorithms are smarter. These tools can test a vast number of subtle patterns that few humans would notice, which means even a fairly long, fairly random-looking password might in fact be quite easily guessable. Because remember, we’re not worried so much about humans guessing your password but about machines guessing it, and machines are likely to test lower-entropy passwords —
especially those based on common mnemonic techniques — long before higher-entropy passwords. (And, if you use the same technique to construct all your passwords from patterns, an attacker who learns one or more of your passwords has an even bigger leg up in guessing the rest.)

More to the point, any technique that relies on your brain for creating and remembering all your passwords is, in my opinion, a waste of mental effort that could be put toward more useful pursuits, such as thinking up bad puns. We have computers and iPads and iPhones and other devices to do this sort of tedious work for us, and they’re much better at it than we are. Let a password manager such as 1Password or LastPass generate, remember, and enter passwords for you, and then you can make them as long and random as you like — it’s no more effort for an app to make a 32-character password than a 10-character one. Sure, you’ll still need to remember a few
passwords, but if you’re doing it right, it’s only a few. (I have only 5 passwords memorized, out of more than 600.)

3: One Password to Rule Them All — Speaking of password managers, these tools make it easy to create a unique random password for every single site and service that uses passwords, and I recommend doing so. I can’t emphasize strongly enough what a bad idea it is to use the same password in more than one place — even if it’s a great password. The fact that reusing passwords is entirely unnecessary if you rely on an automated tool makes it that much more egregious an offense.

Why is it so bad to reuse passwords? Well, it seems like every week or so, there’s another news report about some big company experiencing a security breach of some sort in which thousands or even millions of passwords are lost, stolen, leaked, or hacked. This happened recently to Evernote; before that, a long list of other companies had passwords compromised – Facebook, LinkedIn, Twitter, and more. You can bet this trend will continue.

Now, if someone hacks Amazon.com’s servers and gets your password, that’s bad news, no question about it. But if all your passwords are unique, at least the damage will be limited to that one account. On the other hand, if you use the same password for iCloud, PayPal, Twitter, Gmail, and so forth, you run the very real risk that the attacker may try your password at all those other sites, too, doing considerably more damage.

I’m saying: using unique passwords — even strong unique passwords — doesn’t guarantee security. But it does enable you to contain the damage if your password for any one site is compromised. The people most likely to be harmed by password breaches are those who are oblivious to the problem of password reuse. Don’t be one of them!

4: Online vs. Offline Attacks — Earlier, I mentioned that some sites and services put barriers in place to slow down or derail automated attacks. For example, if you mistype your password once, you might get one or several additional chances to enter it — but with increasing time delays between guesses. And if you enter it incorrectly several times in a row, you might be locked out entirely for a period of time, or until you take some independent action to confirm your identity. The whole point of these barriers is to prevent an automated system from trying many passwords per second until it breaks into your account.

While it’s an excellent idea for developers to employ such barriers, they aren’t as strong as they might appear. That’s because most successful attacks don’t go through the front door, as it were. The real danger comes when, due to a leak or security breach of some kind, someone gets hold of an encrypted file or database that holds all the passwords for a site. With the file in hand, they can perform what’s known as an “offline” attack — they hammer on the raw file with automated tools that check billions of possible passwords per second. Because they’ve entirely circumvented the security measures that slow down guessing, they can potentially decrypt massive numbers of passwords in a short period of time.
(I’m simplifying the story here. Smart developers can also use a combination of techniques — the key terms to look for are “salting” and “hashing” — to frustrate offline attacks, but all too often, a programming error or infelicitous security choice leaves gaping holes that hackers can exploit.)

So, don’t assume you can use a short, simple password because you can’t see any way an attacker could try billions of passwords a second. You’d be surprised what someone can do, particularly given physical access to the computer where the password is stored. Your best defense is to use high-entropy passwords (which take longer to guess) and make sure each one is unique.

Don’t Worry, Be Happy If I’ve increased your anxiety about passwords by telling you what’s wrong with techniques you depend on, I’m sorry. Well, only a little bit sorry, because I want you to have just enough discomfort that you take action to improve your password security and reduce the chance that bad things could happen to your digital life. For extensive details on passwords, including further threats and risks you might face — and my stress-free, three-point strategy for password security — please pick up a copy of “Take Control of Your Passwords.”

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