Words are the least secure way to generate a password of a given length because you are limiting your character set to 26, and character N gives you information about the character at position N+1
The most secure way to generate a password is to uniformly pick bytes from the entire character set using a suitable form of entropy
Edit: for the dozens of people still feeling the need to reply to me: RSA keys are fixed length, and you don’t need to memorize them. Using a dictionary of words to create your own RSA key is intentionally kneecapping the security of the key.
so you are saying 44 bits of entropy is not enough. the whole point of the comic is, that 4 words out of a list of 2000 is more secure then some shorter password with leetcode and a number and punctuation at the end. which feels rather intuitive given that 4 words are way easier to remember
see, you didn’t get the whole comic. 4 words out of a dicitionary with 2000 words has more combinations then a single uncommon non gibberish baseword with numeral and puction at the end. as long as the attacker knows your method.
a dicitonary attack will not lower the entropy of 44 bits, thats what the comic is trying to say
I wonder if you string together enough words can it be a valid key?
I would hope so, sentences and words are some of the most secure passwords/phrases you can use
Words are the least secure way to generate a password of a given length because you are limiting your character set to 26, and character N gives you information about the character at position N+1
The most secure way to generate a password is to uniformly pick bytes from the entire character set using a suitable form of entropy
Edit: for the dozens of people still feeling the need to reply to me: RSA keys are fixed length, and you don’t need to memorize them. Using a dictionary of words to create your own RSA key is intentionally kneecapping the security of the key.
so you are saying 44 bits of entropy is not enough. the whole point of the comic is, that 4 words out of a list of 2000 is more secure then some shorter password with leetcode and a number and punctuation at the end. which feels rather intuitive given that 4 words are way easier to remember
then someone uses a dictionary attack and your password gets cracked within minutes
see, you didn’t get the whole comic. 4 words out of a dicitionary with 2000 words has more combinations then a single uncommon non gibberish baseword with numeral and puction at the end. as long as the attacker knows your method.
a dicitonary attack will not lower the entropy of 44 bits, thats what the comic is trying to say