Day 4 - World Password Day

May the Force Be With You!

Now that we have that behind us, it is also World Password Day. Why is this noteworthy, you may ask? It gives us a reason to talk about passwords and their importance in our lives.

We all understand the basics of passwords. They are used to confirm our right (or level of privilege) to access a resource. During prohibition in the US, passwords were used at speakeasies as a way of proving the entrantant was not a prohibition agent. This is a case of a single password being used by many people (one to many). Our contemporary use of passwords is quite different. Each person has their own password for every account or system they use (many to one).

In the early days of the internet when we had only a handful of online accounts, most of us had a little black book of passwords. As the number of accounts grew, seemingly exponentially, physical password books have become cumbersome and unwieldy. There are many people who still use them. More recently a digital version of a physical password book has become popular, keychain or online password manager.

However you keep track of your passwords, let’s make sure you understand what a strong password is and why a strong password is important. No password is uncrackable! The best you can do is make it take so much time and so much effort to break it that the bad actor decides it is not worth the effort. Jason Andress and Steve Winterfeld illustrate this here: “an eight-character password using only lowercase and uppercase characters has 200 billion possible combinations. Given a reasonably powerful workstation (100,000,000 guesses per second), we could brute force our way through all of the possible combinations in around 30 minutes”. That’s right! 30 minutes! Every character added to the length of a password increases the length of time it would take to crack it. When numbers and special characters are included as possible characters in a password, that raises the level of complexity to the possible password and, thereby, the length of time it would take to discover it.

Tool time! I recommend you investigate the strength of your passwords on a site like PasswordMonster. This site allows you to enter your password and it will tell you how long it would take a computer to discover your password. It also gives an analogy of what that strength means. I suggest trying out your current passwords. https://www.passwordmonster.com/

Cyber Warfare, Jason Andress and Steve Winterfeld. 2014, https://doi.org/10.1016/B978-0-12-416672-1.00006-4

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