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by LinuxBender·9y ago·view on hn ↗
We will just have to disagree. With time, all passwords can be brute forced. If you change them periodically, using a pw manager and/or a strong methodology, then it becomes more expensive to keep brute forcing.

History shows us that sites are popped on a regular basis and their users do not always find out right away. Sometimes the org in question doesn't even know for a while.

2 comments
> With time, all passwords can be brute forced. If you change them periodically, using a pw manager and/or a strong methodology, then it becomes more expensive to keep brute forcing.

That doesn't make sense. If a password already takes longer than the age of the universe to practically brute-force, you're not meaningfully gaining anything by forcing users to change their passwords periodically. On the other hand, you are introducing more opportunities for mistakes to occur in what is already the most dangerous failure point (the human).

I left in a reasonable acknowledgement that technology changes can make currently safe passwords weak in the future. That's a good reason to change a password. But periodic password changes don't make sense unless "periodic" refers to timescales longer than anyone here has been alive, because it's inconsequential compared to the cover time provided by a strong password.

The argument that passwords should be rotated is mostly a response to users predominantly choosing weak passwords. But if you're in a position to enforce password rotation, you're also in a position to enforce strong passwords. Password rotation is a usability-reducing, incomplete and poor method of enforcing user safety. It is wholly superseded by encouraging people to use password managers, which is a much more optimal and complete solution that does not fatigue the user. Password managers make rotation obsolete, can incorporate password breach monitoring and be made virtually frictionless (they can be incorporated directly in the browser and turned on by default).

> If a password already takes longer than the age of the universe to practically brute-force

Give hashcat a go. Give me the hashes from HN. I bet we can break most of them in a day.

MD5: 4d515ed2753dd5c07b176613b21852aa SHA1: ff168736fed129633fba55731730603240c8ac42 SHA256: 27c8b803524883e07b5789ab10a606767d090ad4b8cca0f1c34f071aa8c7fb98

good luck

Here are some stats[1] from some real dumps.

[1] https://hashes.org/public.php

You can't meaningfully brute force a ~70^20+ possibility random password. It's harder than brute forcing 256 bit RSA encryption.