On Thursday 26 February 2004 15:13, John E. Peterson wrote: > I thought of that this morning too. But you forgot something important. > NUMBERS are allowed too. > > So it is a password that is up to 8 characters long using a set of 36, not > 26! (36^8)
No, I didn't forget. I was just setting a baseline for a genuinely random 8 character password. If you use all readily accessible characters on the standard qwerty keyboard, you are looking at (2*46)^8 combinations. [a-z,0-9,-=[]\;',./ plus all the same shifted]. This comes to 5,132,188,731,375,616 or a bit over 5 thousand trillion combinations. > What'cha wanna bet that 95% of the passwords are made up of maybe a couple > thousand different words though. No bets from me on that one. Even if one assumes that there are 20,000 words or word-like combinations commonly used as passwords, these can be brute-forced in a few days. This is why the 'take the first letter from a phrase' (ie, password would be 'ttflfap') approach to passwords is generally seen as a more secure approach for memorable password creation, although I believe that the 'randomness' generated from gramatically correct phrases is still relatively low. Cheers, Rasjid. -- Rasjid Wilcox Canberra, Australia (UTC +11 hrs) http://www.openminddev.net _______________________________________________ VNC-List mailing list [EMAIL PROTECTED] To remove yourself from the list visit: http://www.realvnc.com/mailman/listinfo/vnc-list
