Re: [gentoo-user] Coming up with a password that is very strong.

[Dale <rdalek1967@gmail.com>]

Neil Bothwick wrote:
> On Mon, 04 Feb 2019 11:17:13 +0000, Mick wrote:
>
>>> https://xkcd.com/936/  
>> Not strictly true ... the crackers would probably use rainbow tables
>> attacks first.  Also, it isn't fair to compare an 11 character passwd
>> against a 25 character passwd.  For the *same* number of characters
>> used in any given passwd, a random lower/upper/numerical/symbol passwd
>> will provide an exponentially higher degree of difficulty in cracking
>> it with brute force, than one which uses only lower case dictionary
>> words.  Anyway, these days many attacks are focused on OS or hardware
>> vulnerabilities which have been baked in by design, rather than brute
>> force attacks.
> I'm not sure xkcd is meant to be taken that seriously...
>
>


Sort of picking a random message to reply to here.  Someone sent a reply
off list about checking passwords on my system with tools available.
They also mentioned not trusting strength meters which I can get since
they pass some obvious passwords.  I used three meters and some sort of
common sense as well.  I found cracklib-check after some digging.  I
used that to try to check my password and get this weird response. 

-su: me-supper-secret-password-here;): event not found

I'm going to try to emulate my password without actually posting it, for
obvious reasons.  You all are smart enough to understand why.  ROFL  It
has some of the following 'stuff' in it.  !sdER*ark4567#  As you can
tell, I use some of those things on the tops of the number keys.  It
seems that confuses cracklib just a bit.  BTW, I was running that as
root just to be sure it wasn't a permissions issue.  I tried a few
different things but it seems the "!" is triggering that at least, maybe
others too.  The command works fine with just normal stuff.  That leads
me to this question.  Is there a tool I can use/install that will test a
password, try to crack it if you will, that will work regardless of the
characters used?  In other words, it doesn't mind the things on top of
the number keys. 

BTW, I've also whittled it down to something a little easier to type
too.  Feel sorry for any poor fool trying to just guess it.  lol  May
have better luck with P vs NP.  ;-)

Thanks.

Dale

:-)  :-)