A tall order indeed, but not impossible.įor example, start with a name or address and then modify it a bit. Defending against a thorough dictionary attack means not using a password that any other human has used before. Many websites have been breached over the years and bad guys can find massive databases of passwords that people have used in the past. Things like "Denver2013" or "I like MickeyMouse". This is called a dictionary attack and despite the name, it includes many passwords that are not words in the dictionary. WPA2 passwords can be up to 63 characters long.Īnother type of attack guesses passwords using passwords that other people have already picked. The German government recommends 20 characters as a minimum. A password of 14 or 15 characters should be long enough to defeat most brute force guessing. The shortest password allowed with WPA2 is 8 characters long. An article linked to below discusses hardware that made 6,819,000 guesses/hashes per second.
Moore says MD5 is still very common and it can be brute-forced at the rate of 200 billion guesses/second. The fastest, and thus least secure, algorithm is MD5. If a password is encrypted with SHA256, then we can expect 23 billion guesses/second, with SHA1 expect 70 billion/second. A computationally expensive algorithm, SHA512, slows things down (with his hardware) to 8 billion a second. In addition, Paul Moore says ( Passwords: Using 3 Random Words Is A Really Bad Idea! October 2017) it varies based on the hashing algorithm. None of the suggested passwords below are random.Ĭurious about just how many billions of guesses bad guys can make? This will always vary based on the hardware used for guessing. No one would want to type the first password. It is also important that people are able to say and type the password. But a sufficiently long password does not need to consist of random gibbersih. So, yes, the password "D9fkhu28Fca4c5C9e3cc" is better than passwords such as "5BatteryHorseStaples" or "theSUNwillcomeupinAM" even though they are all 20 characters long. The length of a password is generally considered more important than the randomness when it comes to defending against brute force guessing. A long password is an annoyance for literally a few seconds.Īnother thing all passwords share is that random characters are not brutally important. Long passwords are not an ongoing hassle, since Wi-Fi devices save the password for each network that they join. The only defense against brute force attacks is a long password. The phrase "brute force" refers to making billions of guesses. WPA2-AES and WPA2-CCMP and WPA2 PSK and WPA2 Personal) offers no protection from a bad guy capturing network traffic and using a brute force attack to decrypt it off-line. The biggest mistake you can make, when choosing a Wi-Fi password, is to pick one that is too short. The one exception is that Wi-Fi passwords really need to be long. This, see Scrutinizing WPA2 Password Generating Algorithms in Wireless Routers Usenix (Aug 2015). Perhaps employees of the company that made the router have access to all the passwords. Perhaps the passwords were generated using a formula that someone has figured out. In some cases, the default passwords look like they were randomly chosen. Many routers include default Wi-Fi password(s). And, of course, don't use passwords that someone who knows you might be able to guess. WPA2 passwords can also contain a host of special characters as shown in the examples below. For example, using just lower case letters is a bad idea it is better to include both upper and lower case letters along with numbers. With one exception, the rules for a Wi-Fi password are the same as the rules for all other passwords. 28, 2021 it was greatly revised and moved to this page. NOTE: The information here used to be on the WEP, WPA, WPA2 and WPA3 page
0 kommentar(er)
