Oh, why is (7) considered Good News, below?

Well, it takes 45*365+197 > 16,500 cooperating culprits to crack a 7-character 
random password in 1 day.

If that seems too feasible (it might be), try a challenging length, like 16 
characters.  Just remember the Worse News, (8) in my previous message.

At some point, it is necessary to abandon passwords as reliable for protecting 
the privacy of encrypted documents.  All they do is increase the risk that an 
ordinary user will lose a password and not be able to open one of their own 
private documents.

 - Dennis


-----Original Message-----
From: Dennis E. Hamilton [mailto:[email protected]] 
Sent: Saturday, October 20, 2012 13:15
To: 'Sandy Harris'; [email protected]
Subject: RE: [libreoffice-users] Re: how to crack a PW in LO?

[ ... ]

 6. GOOD NEWS #1 (for now): Even allowing for (4-5), the estimates for longer 
passwords are heartening:

       Pwd   Accent OFFICE
    Length   Time Estimate (same conditions)
        <5   27m03s
        <6   1d19h
        <7   173d3h
        <8   45y197d

    You can see why length and random selection from the full 95 ASCII codes 
matters.  Using larger character sets is even better, of course.  I routinely 
use 15-character randomly-chosen passwords that are never used for more than 
one purpose.

 7. GOOD NEWS #2 (for now): It is possible to crowd-source this work on 
multiple processors or as a challenge with multiple hackers over the internet, 
where the attack space is subdivided.  Normally, one would not want to share 
the document, especially if its decryption is extremely valuable.  However, 
there are parts of encrypted ODF documents that are benign and usable in a 
community/cloud-based attack. Once the password is recovered for that portion, 
the holder of the complete document can decrypt all of it.

[ ... ]


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