On Tuesday 05 December 2006 05:33, Mario Ruiz wrote:
> A brute force attack on a AES (aka Rijndael)/256 enc bits stream using a
> P4/1.5Ghz/512Mb Ram would take around:
>
> passwrd len: 6 chars --360 days (63 chars no caps, caps, digits,..)

Realistically, using modern hardware (eg what I have in my surgery), I can 
almost guarantee you a "next business day" 6 char password

If people use just characters (upper/lower case) + [,.:[EMAIL 
PROTECTED]&*()-=+] + 
numbers it'll be same day.

But even if you use all possible printable ASCII characters (which hardly 
anyone ever does) for your 6 char password, it takes at the most 18 days 
assuming processing 500,000 passwords per second - a bit short of 360 days I 
think. Most people considering brute force attacks have a bit more grunt than 
just a 1.5 GHz P4 nowadays

However:
- if the word of the 6 char passphrase is found in an English dictionary, 
finding it will take less than a minute  even on modest hardware
- if the password includes common mnemonics, SMS shortcuts etc - ditto.
- just upper/lower case characters, plus numbers, periods and exclamation 
marks  a few hours

"Brute force" nowadays means usually a last resort after "educated guesses" 
from long lists of potential passwords

Horst
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