On Tue, 3 Jan 2012, Solar Designer wrote:
On Mon, Jan 02, 2012 at 09:40:36PM -0500, Jonathan Katz wrote:
Say passwords are chosen uniformly from a space of size N. If you never
change your password, then an adversary is guaranteed to guess your
password in N attempts, and in expectation guesses your password in N/2
attempts.
If you change passwords constantly, and an adversary guesses a random
password (with replacement) each password-guessing attempt, then in
expectation the adversary guesses your password in N attempts.
Not exactly. In N attempts, assuming that N is very large, their chance
will be more like 1-1/e, which is around 63%. For a 50% chance, I think
they need to try merely N*ln(2) passwords, or about 69% of N.
At the risk of belaboring this point, there is no contradiction: You are
calculating the probability of compromise after N attempts, and I was
referring to the expected number of attempts before a compromise occurs.
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