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Monday, January 21, 2013

Choosing a good password

How bad spelling and grammar could be the key to choosing a good password

  • Researchers say that good grammar makes passwords far easier to crack
  • Warn against using sentences as passwords
By Mark Prigg
|
Birthdays, pet names and your place of birth are already huge no-nos when choosing a secure password.

But researchers said today that the key to finding more secure passwords could be straightforward - just don't use good grammar or spelling.

Ashwini Rao and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University researched the current generation of password cracking systems.

Researchers say that spelling mistakes and bad grammar can actually be an advantage in passwords, making them harder to crack
Researchers say that spelling mistakes and bad grammar can actually be an advantage in passwords, making them harder to crack

They found that many people, on being asked to choose longer passwords, made them just as easy to guess.

'Use of long sentence-like or phrase-like passwords such as 'abiggerbetterpassword' and 'thecommunistfairy' is increasing,' the researchers say in their paper, due to be presented at the Conference on Data and Application Security and Privacy in San Antonio, Texas, next month.
 
The researchers say that other types of familiar structures like postal addresses, email addresses and URLs may also make for less secure passwords, even if they are long.

They say bad grammar can make a huge difference, as hackers are increasingly searching for passwords using correct grammar and spellings in 'brute force' attacks that simply run through combinations of words in a dictionary.

Incorrect spelling and grammar can fool many of these attacks, the team found.

Misspelling your passwords is actually a big advantage, researchers have found (as long as you can remember it)
Misspelling your passwords is actually a big advantage, researchers have found (as long as you can remember it)

'Using an analytical model based on Parts-of-Speech tagging we show that the decrease in search space due to the presence of grammatical structures can be as high as 50%. '
They found that in general, asking users for longer passwords didn't work.

'A significant result of our work is that the strength of long passwords does not increase uniformly with length,' they said.

The team also developed an algorithm to improve the cracking of long passwords.

CHOOSING A SAFE PASSWORD

 Research firm SplashData suggests making passwords more secure with these tips:

  • Use passwords of eight characters or more with mixed types of characters.
  • For example, 'eat cake at 8!' or 'car_park_city?'
  • Avoid using the same username/password combination for multiple websites.
  • Especially risky is using the same password for entertainment sites that you do for online email, social networking, and financial services.

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