this post was submitted on 17 Jul 2023
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[–] CanadaPlus@lemmy.sdf.org 5 points 1 year ago* (last edited 1 year ago) (2 children)

The idea is that entropy is measured with possible words instead of possible characters. It turns out 7 7-bit ascii characters have less entropy than 4 14-bit equivalent words (that is, the 16,384 most common ones). And that's in the ideal case it's a totally random 7 characters.

Every attack is technically a dictionary attack here, but it doesn't help enough because the password to a computer is still 30 characters long. To a human it seems a lot easier than ")f1:.{yJCzNv]@R=S  K$~= ", though.

PS. Turning /dev/random output into 7-bit ascii characters is surprisingly involved in Haskell. C would have been easier. This was the world's slowest ninja edit.

[–] geissi@feddit.de 1 points 1 year ago

Thanks for the explanation, I remember the explanation in https://xkcd.com/936/ but wasn't sure how that held up for different attack methods.