> Each entry has about 42 bits of randomness. Queries are not recorded.
Randomness is probably as good as the random resource in the operating system.
Hmmm. Such a statement should be backed by proof, not by trust. Until you can run the code locally you can't assume that any of these things is true. As far as we know, this can be a reverse password harvesting scheme.
Is this some sort of argument from authority? I'm not accusing the author of anything.
But now that you mention him, the man was working at Bell labs during the time when Ken wrote his famous essay "reflections on trusting trust". If he shared just a small part of his colleague's spirit, it would be irresistible to him to log all passwords that thousands of people may decide to use. Mainly as a conversation starter, not to do anything bad with these passwords. Maybe he's gathering cool stories in case of a hypothetical Turing award in the future?
Is it paranoia to have proper security practices? You should strive to be excellent in everything you do. I do not think that targeting the GP with an ad hominem attack is a valid argument.
Ok sure, but you're moving the goalposts. The OP was talking specifically with respect to using a non client side password generator. As a joke it is funny, but only a fool would use a password generator that can't be audited and that may be logged.
> only a fool would use a password generator that can't be audited and that may be logged.
Really?
1. It’s from a known-reliable source
2. Even if the password is stored, logged, broadcast around the world for billions to see, so what?
A. Source has no way to know if the user used the password anywhere or saved it
B. Source doesn’t know who the user is
C. Source doesn’t know in which website or resource the password was used.
So… I stand by my paranoia claim. I wouldn’t go so far as to call you foolish like you did me, but I’d say such a world view will not be a net gain for you over your lifetime. You’ll have difficulty delegating work. You’ll have major trust issues. Maybe you already do. But as they say, “you do you.”
But being able to inspect (theoretically even audit) the source, building (if necessary) and running it locally in some container/sandbox without network connection would be minimum reqirements for me.
I use https://www.useapassphrase.com/ since forever and that uses client side generation (i.e. the password never leaves your browser). And speaking about passphrases... I find it borderline insulting that many sites still use the archaic "whateveR1@" format, like, dude, I just gave you sentence worth of words that will take a bazillion more years to crack than passworD1@ ... some people just learn something in school and then use it for 20 years, I swear.
The [capital, number, special] scheme reminds me of the passwords at my uni. Everyone got a plaintext stored (you could recover and get the pw back, I doubt there was any encryption) 7 digit (yes digit, not alphanumeric) password for your account. After a while these were "upgraded" to 8 and must contain a letter. So the amount of [7 digits]+a passwords were massive. They then upgraded to "must contain a lower and upper case" and you got [7 digits]+a+A passwords, after which a special character must be included and the [7 digit]+a+A+! was born...
Security is no issue if you don't care. They did abolish unhashed storage after a while (and a while is really quite recent).
Reminds me of default passwords on wifi routers a decade ago - ATT especially had a very identifiable SSID format (ATT###), and a default 10-digit password. That leaves you with (9,999,999,999 + 1 =) 10 billion[1] passwords possible, which even at that time only took a couple hours to test all of them. That SSID pattern also left you with only 1,000 possible SSIDs, so a rainbow table was definitely reasonable.
[1] - though now that I think about it, that might not properly cover the case of leading zeroes in the password, so the total number of possible passwords might be larger than 10B; that's assuming a naïve password list generated just from numbers, not from treating the digits as characters, so I need to reason about this a bit more...
It's O(10 billion), so your intuition is good regardless :) passwords with ten 10-digits: 10x10x... = 10^10 = 10 billion, passwords with nine digits = 10^9, etc etc down to 11,111,111,110 (I don't think we should count the empty password). The full length password dominates the size of the keyspace so much that you more or less get truncations for free.
Eh, that's still better than my days at Uni where my student ID was my Social Security Number and grades were posted outside the classroom as a sheet with everyone's SSN and their scores.
Do you vet the JS this site sends you every time you use if, or do you trust that because it was client side in the past it will always remain so? Also, picking four random words "meat side" is pretty easy in my experience, but using a client side (not browser) password manager neatly solves the "inane password complexity requirements" problem.
One of the neatest bonuses that you get from using pgen instead is that it can also tell you the amount of entropy of passphrases that each combination of settings (wordlist, number of words) will produce. This alone should ideally be reason enough to adopt pgen :)
I do the same and it usually only takes a few days to a week to learn a 16 character pretty random looking password, which with an 6-monthly change-your-password-rule is no big deal.
It bothers me how much folks parrot this XKCD, especially using it to imply passphrases are superior. They are in fact not! Four common words are definitely easier to remember, but is it really feasible to remember hundreds (thousands?) of truly unique four word combinations easily? I would argue strongly it’s not for most people, so then you’re still using a password manager for the vast majority of passwords. Yes, you still need to remember a few, where then passcodes are ok. Also, many sites have arcane password complexity requirements (protip site owners, the only thing that really matters is length) which may not allow for your passphrase as suggestingly formatted by XKCD, thus needing a password manager more.
If we are using a password manager as we should be, there is no real justification for using memorable passwords for the majority of passwords. Let’s use the example from XKCD:
correct horse battery staple = 2048^4 = 2^44
If instead we use the same length of 28 characters with the full range of characters allowed by most websites:
M4Uk@gQRU!JFgwlI6MV$VV39TEA. = 70^28 = ~2^172
Dunno about you, but I’ll gladly take significantly more entropy with zero extra cost any day.
I don't remember all of them and I use a password manager, that's true.
But If I need to login on a device where my password manager is not installed, or you can't use a password manager (e.g. windows UAC prompt, linux tty), it will be way easier to open my password manager on my phone and type a password rather than a long random string.
I don't use a passphrase for every login, but for some logins where I think it could be benefitial to easily type it without using autofill I use them.
Yep. For most logins, a password manager is the way. But there are some you are simply going to have to or want to remember (password manager key, workstation login), and for those, passphrases are better.
What about your login password though? Or an email password which you occasionally need to access on a machine you don't control? Those are the passwords where I use a passphrase.
It might make a slight difference or it might not, but you can't know that it will so best to assume that it doesn't. In practice the amount of computing power actually available is going to make much more difference than the method used.
IMO, pass phrases only seem useful if you have a quite insecure password. It is ideal to aim for 115-128 bits of entropy, which is not that bad with just random lower case letters and numbers (24 characters is good) but turns into a long and complex passphrase. To learn a random password write it down (split into groups of 6ish characters) and copy it from the paper for 2-4 weeks (do not try to guess until you are almost certain your guess is correct).
Indeed, the XKCD comic Password Strength does not argue against password managers, but sometimes when someone posts that comic I wonder why they need to come up with a memorable password given that password managers exist.
Secondly, jsjohnst was not supporting silly password rules, merely pointing out that a password manager can make the password rules less of a hassle to comply with [https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=39690528]:
> Also, many sites have arcane password complexity requirements (protip site owners, the only thing that really matters is length)
So this is basically the swordfighting sim in the Snow Crash metaverse (well, The metaverse, this one does not require a qualifier), but ported to Monkey Island. Should we take Hiro Protagonist's swordplay acumen as a warning to question the promised randomness?
While what you say is absolutely true, a cursory skim of the website's webmaster's profile[1] suggests he would be putting a lot of reputation on the line if he were acting maliciously.
According to the movie, the Enigma was broken because each message closed with the exact same phrase in every message. These all start with the exact same word.
However, anyone taking this thing as anything more than the jovial manner in which it is intended is not someone that understands a word of what you just said. So it's all just grandstanding for the sake of it
Assuming that person trying to brute force your password knows that this passphrase generator exists and starts their search with all possible insult passphrases, otherwise they're searching in a much larger space
Of course, searching through all eight word combinations will be quite a bit harder. But that does not really protect you that much. If you are attacking passwords, you will try increasingly large sets of possible passwords. After you have gone through the million most common passwords and so on, you will also sooner than later spend a few minutes on trying all those insults before moving on to all eight word combinations, at least if this generator becomes popular enough to warrant inclusion in an attack.
Hmmm. Such a statement should be backed by proof, not by trust. Until you can run the code locally you can't assume that any of these things is true. As far as we know, this can be a reverse password harvesting scheme.