If you are brute forcing passwords, knowing the length only reduces the number of passwords to try by like 1 hundredth.

elcritch 13 hours ago | parent | next [-]

Drats, you're right. I thought it'd be worse, but the ratio seems to only depend on the number of letters in your character set: 1/count(letters in alphabet).

For ascii at 95 printable chars you get 0.9894736842. Makes intuitive sense as the "weight" of each digit increases, taking away a digit matters less to the total combos.

Maybe I'll start using one Japanese Kanji to confuse would be hackers! They could spend hours trying to brute force it while wondering why they can't crack my one letter password they saw in my terminal prompt. ;)

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dhosek 5 hours ago | parent | next [-]

I’ve occasionally contemplated using some non-ASCII character like • or š in a password, but have backed off for fear of needing access from a device that doesn’t support input of those characters.

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Obscurity4340 10 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

Its funny how a single japanese symbol would be harder to crack than the anglicized name for it

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LoganDark 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Do we know if the asterisks count Unicode code points rather than bytes?

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Izkata 5 hours ago | parent [-]

Doesn't really matter, the IME shows the input until you confirm which kanji you want.

	▲	LoganDark 5 hours ago \| parent [-]
		When the IME inserts the character, it'll be made up of multiple bytes because of the nature of UTF-8, so it may appear as multiple asterisks regardless.

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egeres 13 hours ago | parent | prev [-]

It also give you the possibility of filtering out which ones are worth cracking and which ones not

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elcritch 13 hours ago | parent [-]

It could also give useful priors for targeted attacks, "Their password is 5 characters, and their daughters name is also 5 characters, let's try variations of that".

	▲	justsomehnguy 3 hours ago \| parent [-]
		Some system accessible to hackers who can see the length of the password /and/ having a single 5 char password has a security of a key under a doormat.