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gzread 15 hours ago

Leaking the length of your password is about as bad for security as leaking the fact that you have a password, or that you use sudo.

ikari_pl 15 hours ago | parent [-]

It narrows down the brute force domain by several orders of magnitude

gzread 15 hours ago | parent | next [-]

No, it doesn't. The set of all passwords of exactly length N is about 1% smaller than the set of all passwords up to and including length N.

adrian_b 12 hours ago | parent | next [-]

The point is that you know that the password is not longer than N.

This indeed reduces the search domain by many orders of magnitude, i.e. by more than an order of magnitude for each character that you now know that it is not used by the password.

Knowing the length of the password does not matter only in antediluvian systems, which had severe restrictions on the length of a password, so you already knew that the password is no longer than, e.g., 8 characters.

gzread 12 hours ago | parent [-]

Bruteforce search in increasing length order will find the password in within 1% of the same amount of time

themafia 12 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

> is about 1% smaller

Isn't it 10%?

gzread 12 hours ago | parent [-]

If there are 9 different characters that can be in a password.

15 hours ago | parent | prev | next [-]
[deleted]
emil-lp 15 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

That's obviously false. It narrows it down less than a factor the length of the password, so unless your password is several orders of magnitude, it lowers narrows by a factor of ~8.

adrian_b 12 hours ago | parent [-]

That is obviously true, not false.

If you know that a password is no longer than, e.g., 10 characters, that narrows down the search domain by many, many orders of magnitude, in comparison with the case when you did not know this and you had to assume that the password could have been, e.g. 18 characters long.

If you test the possible passwords in increasing length, then knowing the length would not shorten much the search, but not knowing the length may prevent an attempt to search the password by brute force, as such an attempt would fail for longer passwords, so it is not worthwhile to do unless success is expected.

With modern hashing schemes, which require both a lot of time and a lot of memory for each tested password, even one extra character in the password can make the difference between a password that can be cracked in a useful time and one that would take too much time to crack, so knowing the length can be very important for the decision of an attacker of trying the exhaustive search approach.

Knowing the length is less important only for the users who are expected to choose easy to guess passwords, as there are much less of those than the possible random passwords.