
just like what we call that a primitive bot doing only HTTP requests or HTTP requests not doing the entire website so same thing goes for the mobile app use the latest version make sure only the latest version is being used track usage on all the versions but you can validate it add all kinds of tricks into your system and it could be any kind of hash calculations that will let you know that it is really is the latest version being used on your app very nice open-source JavaScript library you can use to do like fingerprinting the similar things to mobile and one thing that's especially for mobile really is a great great way to protect yourself is the
legitimate flow sense an app is constructed in a constant flow of paths you can use that to understand if somebody trying to do a login is a legitimate user or not if it didn't do the device in it for example if you have in your app or something like that this is not a real app being used against your system if it did too many requests or any kind of deviation from your own system and you built it you should know what's happening you can use and they are fortunate ik remember they don't necessarily go through the entire flow they don't understand if a token was returned that said do the in it three times and only if it was done three
times you can make sure it's a system so these kind of things you can do in order to understand if this is a real mobile app or not and the last thing it's also the last slide before I'm wrapping up we need to do mitigation so two things I want you to remember from this one if you're blocking by the IP remember they are using residential IPS so if a block IPS you're blocking eventually you're blocking potential consumers on your system so if it if you do it don't load indefinitely and they also sense it's residential IPS because its IOT devices being used these will be replaced so you need to have your rules with like a
TTL on them and and and clear them and we and and refresh them and the second one is more of a conceptual thing which is really important when you do security don't give the attackers the feedback loop and help them understand that you stop them if for a legitimate login request with the wrong password you say incorrect password but for something you decided like the IP that was blocked because you decided NATO you said for a one for example you're giving them a feedback loop they know they understand it's very simple to improve your system when you have something to run against so the simplest solution I would say is every every time I log in fails no
matter what's the reason se invalid password they don't know if it's just because the success rate would be a quarter of percent so even everything they expect most login attempts to fail so if they don't know if everything failed because of that or because you identify them and block them they're in the dark they will not improve you can have better security on your system and something it we need to keep reminding yourself not to give them a feedback loop on what's happening to in all accounts not only in this case but in this case we have seen that more feedback loop you give to the attackers the faster they can improve what they were doing and try and look for ways to
bypass a system last life for questions what I said some of the examples I will load on my github if it interests you you can ping me on my Twitter handle and if there are questions hi curious if you have seen anyone use or if you think there's validity to using things like TLS fingerprinting or like tar pitting the answer is yes ah yes you can recycler with the headers like what I said about the headers tearless fingerprinting is valid curl for example has a very specific TLS fingerprinting but you do need to look at the entire information being collected not only the selected TLS because it hides a lot of features behind it but definitely though
there will be a potential false positive there so it can't be used on its own you need to combine it with other features but yes any more questions ok I don't see anything hands up please give a warm round of applause [Applause]
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good afternoon everyone thank you all for joining us in Las Vegas for the Las Vegas besides this is ground one two three bang which is the most excitingly named track we have out here today a few announcements uh before we get going we have many sponsors the without whom we could not do this talk we could not do any of this conference I would like to thank our inner circle sponsor rapid7 and our stellar sponsors Amazon oath Taos Seminole and so many others but we'll list endgame in this presentation it is their support along with our other sponsors donors and volunteers and make this event possible cell phones these talks are being recorded streamed and
presented on the internet later if your cell phone goes off we will remember you as the person whose cell phone went off in this presentation it's not a good look please don't be that person if you have a question for our presenters during or after during your during your just during or after this presentation please raise your hand I will find you you will talk into this microphone so the people in the on the internet can hear you without I guess we'll we'll introduce our lovely presenters now this is Randy Abrams and Brianna Butler doing the effects of password constraints on password viability no further ado please take it away
[Applause] how many of you remember adjusting the rabbit ears on your black-and-white TV so you could get a better picture of the Apollo 12 launch yeah neither you actually adjusted the rabbit ears for the launch or just remember adjusting rabbit ears yeah so that countdown was from the actual Apollo 12 lunch you might notice that there's only a limited set of symbols on the screen I deliberately did not place the entire symbol set there and this will be important all right so I'm Brianna Butler an engineering data analysts at Webroot I spend my days looking at data understanding where it comes from how flow server systems and ideally gleaming some insight from that data and I'm very
excited to be here to present our analysis on the password constraints and thank you for having us I would also like to send a thank you out to our intern Chad he helped a lot with our analysis and write in a lot of the code for and I'm Randy Abrams I'm gonna be Brianna's lovely assistant today another shout out to Chad real quick he was never intended to be a presenter we just felt his contributions were such that he gets on there too I'm a senior security analyst at Webroot prior to joining Webroot I worked at NSS Labs where I did an analysis of anti-malware testing before that the director of technical education at ISA and prior to that I
designed and administered the processes that Microsoft used to prevent the release of infected software as an analyst I like to present an unique analysis of you that someone else or few people have actually given not the standard hype I've got personalize type No so with that we're gonna get going all right so I'd like to begin with a few questions by a show of hands do any of you you do any of your employer's enforce any passer requirements or complexity sure a lot yes how about you know your bank your brokerage firm ISP email social networks right now for this one go ahead and keep your hands down the answer is yes unless it's yes do you
only use your employers minimum length requirements all right and lastly who do any of you use own symbol only passwords that are 8 characters or longer all right well think about that again because we're gonna come back to that sort of as Randy mentioned all right so we all know from The Hitchhiker's Guide to the galaxy that the meaning of life is 42 well we're here to present that the meaning of passwords is six hundred and twenty nine thousand five hundred and fifty-one how do we come to this number I will tell you we began with about twenty years of dates and or excuse me eighty years ago of dates and twenty different formats of those dates and that came to
five hundred eighty four thousand we then added five hundred names sure none of you used those and password next we added twenty thousand words or what we might think as clever words interestingly in some of our analysis we found entropy was used which we thought was a clever word for passwords then we added fifty numeric passwords followed by about twenty-five thousand typos which I'm sure all of us have one point or another have typed into a log in you know the wrong password with the typos and then we've reconfirmed that again with another typo only to find that we are you know then asked you again and we end with the correct one and we've now
forced a password reset we didn't know if we should include this because really is just twenty five thousand password resets you know men you don't last long enough to actually be correct and then we have one more read me give you guys a hint on this one you may not be able to hear it one more time oh no all right well it is NCC - 1 7 0 1 sorry pan fries it's only a logical folks so and that is how he came to Bimini no passwords and that was Klingon for don't be silly all right so this presentation is really about probability attacks versus possibility attacks and the genesis of this was kind
of a perfect storm for me I'm always frustrated that I can't use a great passphrase yet I can use something stupid like cat 1.2 exclamation point and it frustrates me also at the same time I was looking into passphrase token attacks linguistic paths for his token attacks and I wrote a blog about why enterprises don't care about the top 10,000 most frequently used passwords and it's because they don't meet the constraints they don't have length and complexity so why should you care if they're not possible in that environment so we're gonna look at a probability attack it's the dictionary attack why do you start with a dictionary attack because it's probably gonna nail the password and when that dictionary attack
runs out you might turn to less probable attacks and then you turn to brute force which actually starts testing the impossible another kind of attack are you familiar with passphrase token attacks if not just let me know I've got a very brief oh okay so a past a password brute-force attack you check one character at a time for a passphrase token attack you treat each word as a character now a lot of people get the math wrong they think that ninety five to the fourth let's say four for character were translates to the same thing for a passphrase the problem with that is there are actually over a million words in the English language so a forward
pass phrase each word has over million possibilities it got a million to the fourth now in order to reduce the probability nobody uses a million words nobody has that kind of vocabulary however research I've seen indicates that about 5,000 words are in the average person spoken vocabulary 10,000 in the written vocabulary so you narrow your dictionary down to about 5,000 words perhaps and now instead of having a million to the fourth you have 5,000 to the fourth which is still a huge number but you've made a big dent because you're using a probability attack now the linguistic passphrase token attacks rather esoteric but the idea behind it is let's narrow down the probabilities some more by looking at
how words are put together so a verb frequently follows a noun here an but you can also go beyond linguistic parts of speech to common combinations of word like if I say oh my is a probable follow-up word Oh Maya is very common now I could say ship but I'm probably not gonna say oh now password constraints will differentiate between the possible and the impossible as you know Twitter or may know Twitter has a couple hundred banned words so now you've got ninety five to the eighth for an eight character password permutations of characters minus 200 permutations of characters but this stuff gets a lot better alright so with that I'd like to introduce a few of the questions we were
attempting to answer with our analysis first you know how many patter how is there really an effect of imposing constraints on password and does it really matter and one of the first questions is how many passwords do constraints eliminate and then how hard could it be to get an exact count you know we would look at a money part excuse me Monte Carlo simulation to look at you know to get an approximation and with the margin of error it could also look at the inclusion exclusion principle and we would get an exact count but now inclusion exclusion who hasn't used this lovely phrase in a love-letter but it's really good with a small amount of variables but as that
increases it gets quite complex as those variables increase you know this kind of becomes your brain on the inclusion exclusion and so we went forward with the Monte Carlo simulation so what it really came down to for the difference between these algorithms was runtime the inclusion exclusion would run in exponential time represented by Big O of 2 to the K times n with Big O representing sort of limitations or the performance of the algorithm and that would that it's you know at most inclusion exclusion will run at 2 to the K times n K representing the number of variables or the combination of the constraints and n being the number of password iterations in this case we
iterated through 10,000 passwords and it took nearly 15 seconds which may not seem like a large number but as you you know get into larger variables and you're looking at computation resources that's something you want to consider whereas with the money Carlo which would run in linear time Big O of n so most would run with n we you know that ran through the same amount of iterations 130 times faster than the inclusion exclusion so of course we kind of move forward with the Monte Carlo just you know in the thought of time and processing power and we wanted it to you know finish before Haley's comment came back you know 2061 all right now I'd like to
walk through a little bit of this pipe python script I'm not gonna go line by line but or anything and if you'd like to follow up or have any questions please feel free to email us we're happy to talk through it so you began with importing our Python libraries and then we had a function make grande pass that generated our random passwords then we identified our variables you know assigning the characters from our ASCII list from there we were able to you know define the character lengths in the pass line and how many passwords we would like to create from there we had a for loop that iterated through these constraints basically you know these conditionals were the constraints
so and we were able to vary that by hashing out what we didn't want to include to get the combinations here print statements we basically printed you know how many passes were rejected due to these constraints and the standard deviations and this is an example of one of the outputs where we you know required a character passwords a million of them and what we saw here you know or kind of goes back to my earlier point with the lower case and upper case you know inclusion/exclusion that number would have been the same here you see a bit of deviation you know due to that margin of error so the idea of an infinite number of passwords is a
myth that would mean that it's completely unconstrained and that is not actually possible for us so in this finite world there are limitations constraints you don't have enough space in the password input field storage space for that password and that's a constraint life is another constraint you can spend your whole life typing in a password and with your dying breath you'll realize you never confirmed it so you wait for another go around with the reincarnation and you spend your whole life typing in this password and with your dying breath you realize didn't take because there was a typo and so on and your daddy never got to use it that's really really a bummer I think so
it turns out that if you if n is one and being the number of character sets characters 95 then yes X to the N is the maximum number permutations okay we're back but if X is greater than n that's not true the length constraint if I say that you can only use a characters or if I say you have to use at least eight characters then from that 95 to the 8 95 to the seventh permutations of characters are not possible they're impossible go ahead and brute-force them you're spinning your wheels choosing a character set actually the act of creating a password imposes constraints you have to choose a character to start with and the choice of character sets is
going to introduce some constraints so going forward when I talked about constraints I'm not saying that you can only use a symbol or you can only use a number I'm saying you must use that but you can use any of the other character sets so symbols are the least impactful of the constraints but as soon as you say your password has to have assemble with no other constraints for an eight character password you've eliminated 3.3 percent of the maximum number of character permutations so three percent less are actually viable passwords and as a result piglet is the first casualty piglet was one is one cute little dude is my favorite example for teaching people how to create passphrases
piglet was one cute little dude is very memorable because it has more than four words the power of exponentiation means that passphrase token attack is very unlikely to succeed but because of corporate constraints and there's not a symbol in there piglet is not kosher the lowercase constraint this gets interesting when you go and say it has to have a letter it has to have a lowercase letter in there you've eliminated seven point eight percent of that ninety-five to the eight character permutations seven point eight percent cannot form a password if you try to crack those permutations you're spinning your wheels again of course uppercase is identical and impact because the character sets are identical and count okay this is where
it gets really interesting is when you combine the constraints now you can see with an eight character password just the lowercase and symbol constraint eliminate one out of ten possible password permutations from this character permutation set and at sixteen characters you broke the one percent barrier and when you get to lowercase uppercase symbol now you're eliminating almost one in five potential passwords so one in five brute camps a force that brute jumps theoretically is going to be trying something that could never ever work now you remember the countdown nine eight seven six five four three two one zero ten numbers numbers are one of the wars things are one of the bad things that you can do to a password I
shouldn't say worse because humans know how to do worse but the moment that you say your password has to have a number forty percent of all character permutations for the given password for the eight character password and that goes down with lengths are no longer possible that means only six out of ten Bruce ports attack attempts or actually trying something that could exist and so we tell people you have to have upper case you have to have lower case you have to have symbols you have to have numbers and looking at that chart do we really need to make it complex do we actually have to say you have a number in it I kind of questioned
that okay after the zero came that set of symbols and that was a constraint set of symbols have you ever had to enter a password at a website or an application where it says you have to have a symbol but you can only choose from this small set well if you limit it to eight symbols what have you done you've taken this 33 character set and reduced it to eight characters so right off the bat what you've done is taken away from 600 six thousand six hundred thirty four trillion and dropped it down to a measly measly five hundred and seventy six trillion which is roughly the national debt so what happens now four out of ten
of those fully constrained passwords are viable as passwords as a brute force attack six out of ten password permutations character permutations you're attempting aren't even passwords and so if you understand this and you're able to manipulate it then your probability attack grows in the probability that it can succeed before Halley's Comet returns all right now what password talk will be complete without a nod to entropy before I sort of dive into this I'd like to give Randy's highly technical definition of entropy it is a mathematical equation that proves humans are not nearly as clever as we think we are especially when it comes to pasture creation now technically entropy here is a measure of randomness it's a measure of the
strength of our passwords and it's measured in bits it's not a calling there we you know use enter here we were using entropy or actually let me explain the equation here we take log base two of what the password is composed of or potentially composed of and all that ^ the length of the password so for this case I was looking at the entropy for an eight character password using the full ASCII set so his night log base two of 95 today and I was comparing it after you know taking that phone number and taking the percentage we looked at so I handful those constraints at applying entropy to what was left and we really
didn't see much of a change in the entropy you know from a character kind of went to the entropy of a to a seven-point eight so nothing huge in you know no big changes and as we looked at longer passwords we saw an even lessened impact you know really and what that said is length matters length is huge when developing a strong password and - no entropy really doesn't look at the human factor humans are you know not able to make these maximum entry passwords and if we could have probably a lot better for everyone now when comparing the maximum entropy s we you know decided that entropy is really more of an esoteric afterthought
and that humans predictability and the way we make passwords is something to be contended with and this is just sort of reinforced izing that Brandi will sort of talk about this password dump that we used but in in the next few slides but I'm going to talk about it a little bit here so on the left here is the top most frequently used symbols in the password set and the top four actually represent about 75% of the symbols used all ten of these represent about 95 you know that's ten symbols representing ninety five out of this million password um where they're actually 33 available symbols and you know when you look at a probability attack that there are 23
symbols you could probably leave out and would likely get these symbol that was being used on the right side is the frequency of symbols out of all the characters in password dump and all total this these ten symbols represent only about two three percent of the characters use out of all the characters available now I know three slides on entropy in a row my DQ no consecutive slides might decrease the entropy for a slide deck but sort of really drive home the point though you know humans make low entry passwords and we looked at the composition of eight to eleven character passwords and if you can see here about 44% are composed of just lower cases and numbers and 31 here
are composed of just lowercase numbers and the top four in this list out of twelve possible constraints and combination of those constraints represent about I believe 93 percent so you know we're really sticking to some very just you know small constraint factors here and continue to make low entropy with that here and symbols only simple passwords represent a very small percent so when I was thinking about this I had a hypothesis that the nature of password composition probably changes with length constraints and I wondered you know is there a likelihood that the first character is going to be different if it's a 12 character password then the first character of an eight character password I also wondered could there be
a useful correlation between the length of the password and the predictability of the last character and then what about the correlation between first and last I wondered about a whole bunch of other things too but I had to finish the presentation and so I found it really interesting we got these passwords from a million password um I don't know if you've heard of Mark Burnett he's a noted password expert he dumped actually 10 million usernames and passwords and wrote an article about why the FBI should not arrest him but this was back into 2015 and I can only find a dump of a million of those but these million actually have some attribution we know
that some of them came from LinkedIn and some came from RockYou and there are other companies that are that have attribution and so I was hoping that I would get a good set of constrained passwords and it wasn't exactly what we wanted but let's look at what we found none of you have long stumble passwords we found that nothing over twelve characters was symbol only and very few actually in the whole set much of less eight to eleven had just symbols and that was not unexpected however an interesting thing as a probability attack-defense if your password is all symbols it's probably not gonna get attacked first if someone's actually doing it smart and there's another reason numbers only no
surprise the shorter passwords are numbers only about the time you get past the telephone number the numbers only passwords then to die off the numbers and symbols that was the yes the no part was this is a really small sample set there weren't a lot of these long ones in the million password um however I found it really interesting and I wondered ok let's say that it isn't the problem with the statistic significance such a small set let's say that there's a method to the madness and I started thinking about it and I realized as a strategy this is genius and the reason is because of the ASCII table if you look at the ASCII table there are about
1516 symbols that come first and next do you have numbers and next you have symbols and next you have uppercase letters followed by more symbols followed by lowercase numbers and symbols that symbols in the ASCII table are distributed throughout the entire ASCII table if you're going to do a brute-force attack you're not going to hit all symbols until late into the attack and if you're doing a decrementing attack you run into the same issue if you split the the numbers in half run two computers doing half and half they'll never get it which it's like huh that's really smart I'm gonna have to start choosing symbols a little bit more carefully but how do you
remember a 16 character password that's numbers and symbols only and it turns out exact well no you just have to remember that password for the password manager the whole point of a password manager is you don't have to remember them but and actually this could be a great technique for the master password for a password manager so consider this open bracket open paren 9 5 caret which is the exponentiation symbol 1 2 close parent - open parent 9 5 carrot 1 1 close parent close bracket 95 to the 12th - 95 - 11 sound a bit familiar to any of you that's so easy to remember just come up with a formula that means something to
you or you can easily memorize you've got your symbols the number sets easier to remember because it's only 10 verses 26 letters so it reduces complexity for you to remember your ASCII characters are spread out and just like well if someone's doing that on purpose that is so clever they're actually the ones one of the ones that are the exception to the rule that proves that entropy is mathematical evidence that people aren't so clever that one looking at the rest of the results I didn't really see much that could be used very effectively for a probability attack it was a little anomalous that 12 to 15 character passwords tended to have lowercase and uppercase only I am a bit
skeptical about how well that would hold up I think the numbers and symbols the print of sandwich would go down but not as much as lowercase uppercase first character analysis was really fun and we were blown away W came out on top and of course you expect number 1 to come out on top 1 2 3 4 and so on and if this was across all million passwords if you looked at the shorter ones then you see that number one comes in number one and how did W come in number two this is I mean that was baffling to me and another thing if you look at these nine out of ten symbol or characters used in the
short passwords were the same as in the entire million character dump in terms of top 10 frequency but s is the only one that maintains the number four position in both of these sets and then you have one character that it's present in one set but not present in the other now these long ones as I said these are what interests me the 12 characters and longer and this blew me away only the 12 character longer passwords had a very high probability of capital letters as a first letter and it kind of makes sense because if you're going with these long passwords you might be using a passphrase and as you saw with piglet was one cute little dude the first
letter and piglet was a capital P it's how we form sentences so that part made me not so surprising but again uppercase and lowercase four out of five are the same for uppercase and lowercase and if you look at for all passwords frequency you got numbers and you got no uppercase so potentially this can help in a probability attack against your longer passwords which are the ones that are a lot harder to brute-force so the first ASCII value in these longer passwords I wondered how predictable is that and it's pretty surprising that the first four of the top ten first characters used a counter 61% of those longer passwords in the password dump and in fact the top 10 account for 80%
and it's like huh that can probably be used to aid a probability attack and if you look at the last ASCII value that most common ones are numbers except the period snuck in there and again if you have a constrained password you have to have a symbol in it a period ends a sentence and that's one way to comply with the policy the first character last character analysis maybe it doesn't matter but it interested me and this is correlated so if the password starts with the w it's more likely to end with the one than anything else the S remember s has maintained number four in both sides the S had a unique characteristic that it was more likely
to end in a letter than a number no if I have insomnia for a couple of years and maybe I'll try to analyze those million passwords and figure out if there's a pattern to s passwords ending with a letter so just as Breanna and Chad thought they done all the analysis I asked for I came across a call to point 1 5 million password dump on github now this did not have that bution I suspect a million of the 2.1 five million are from the same million 10 million password dump that I could only get a million of so it lacks attribution which may affect the composition but we found w disappeared from the top ten I mean that was I never
expected to see it in the top ten in the first place so that was an interesting and expected actually change number one anyone here surprised that number one took the number one position nope nobody else s moved from number four to number two and that's not surprising because I believe s is the most common consonant in the English language so it's not surprising that it moved up there and a move from ten to three and that's not surprising either because vowels are such an important part of any word except for Klingon words now the s factor mystery continued you can see where M now is 3 out of 10 M words start words that start with them are going to
end with a letter and the rest are numbers and the s factor has decreased a bit but still four out of ten passwords starting with s and with a letter and I found that quite interesting and particularly you see a of course number one is the last one but if it starts with an A it's highly likely to end with an A and why do you think that is my hypothesis is because the password was ABBA and in fact Abba did show up in the list all right now for the 95 to the twentieth dollar question can the impossible passwords be filtered out of the possible passwords enough to really matter does it even make a difference
will this allow people to crack passwords passwords no faster and with you know from that we had a few conclusions you know none of this would actually really matter if you aren't able to filter out the valid possible passwords and to do so it would you know to flexibly prioritize the guesses and to excuse me not use excessive computational resources to do so either way it doesn't really matter if you can't accommodate those especially today but tomorrow as processing power increases Moore's Law the impact may be significant we know we understand that to provide more statistically significant information we need more data or password dumps that have the fully fully constrained passwords may be representative of you know corporate
password dumps that type of stuff we understand that and we would contend that our analysis does provide some mathematical support for nist password policy guidelines decrease the length increase or excuse me increase the length and decrease the complexity requirements so through much of our analysis and discussions our intern chat actually had an interesting idea may not be unique but what a passwords constraints were generated you know we're different on a per user basis so you know every person who logged into or created an account with Facebook or with Instagram something like that received a different set of constraints maybe one person gets 12 character in other requires 8 you know you you vary those and that's a much different game than
you know it's really difficult to guess if you have all these who would know then guessing X to the N or knowing X to the N minus X to the N minus 1 this also really helps would help fight these constraint attacks ultimately phishing attacks are the great password equalizer you know we can all any password whether it's 30 characters long or password 1 2 3 it wouldn't matter they could take the path of least resistance and simply ask politely for the password politely is relative but the question really is shouldn't we be continuing the talk on multi-factor authentication or maybe it's a biometric authentication although DNA may not be a great option as you
know ancestry.com has already got those passwords and everyone paid to give it to them so lastly we would like to acknowledge some folks Maurice Midler who is our machine learning guru and helped in who wrote our Monte Carlo simulation for us guy Cowan who helped us to manipulate that and chat again for his awesomeness and helping with the analysis and everything and so this whole presentation because I just wanted to know how much it took a while to find out and I still don't know how much I know percentages and so with that we'll open the floor to questions and answers and we have our email addresses there and I'm at Randy AP on Twitter hello you alluded in the end to
the constraints from Vincent the company policies I work very much with Active Directory and cracking actual directory passwords I'm very focused on knowing what the policy is so I can keep that in my record because you may have a constraints of 8 characters only but my password is definitely longer than E so even though that your if my past but leaked the constraint will not be representative in the dump so can you allude a little more through the constraints compared to the actual data I know that the data was kind of small you lose that Randy but but can you talk about that yes I talked to a cryptographer and said can you please help me with the map on this
and also a theoretical physicist who ultimately said I'll pawn this off to a graduate student and that was one of the things I wanted to know what if the constraint is eight my password is nine and ultimately Murray said that this Monte Carlo simulation is going to get out of hand another the constraints I wanted to know was what about if it's you can't have three identical characters in a row three consecutive of the same character because interestingly that has a lot less effect on a short password than on the long password so I wish I could answer your question I had the exact same question and there's any mathematicians cryptographers that want to take a stab at it please let me know
yeah the human aspect actually is most people are probably gonna use the shortest password that they can I was I was really surprised when I worked at NSS I worked with other security analysts and they were watching me type in my 20 plus character password and goats how long is your password and they said I only use the twelve characters
do you have any sense for how dependent your analysis is on being English speakers that were doing the passwords we discuss yeah and I mean it's another one of the things that I've seen on discussions with people that know as little as I do about it except I figure the analysis out there ask well doesn't matter if I use the word in a foreign language and the person will say no I've got foreign language words in my dictionary yeah it makes a huge difference because you've had to expand the dictionary size and then the foreign words that you choose how common is that language someone might have had to change their dictionary from 5,000 to
50,000 to encompass those foreign words and then of course with Chinese Japanese Korean Hebrew Arabic Russian you've got these different character sets and one of the things I'm still working on putting together an educational presentation about pass phrases is make it fun aside from silly stuff like piglet learn a foreign word in an obscure language learning how to say dog in Swahili because now what you're doing is you're increasing the dictionary size and it's not a language it's gonna be one of the first 20,000 dictionary words so yeah non English makes a big difference in those character sets does it also impact the the frequency analysis that you were using for setting up your probability tables I don't know
I don't speak Chinese the password UMP that we got is only English so it'd be a lot of fun to do analysis on foreign language password dumps but I haven't found any if you've got any please share and understanding how they you know their heuristics of their password making and that's a whole nother topic I believe okay I don't see any other hands so give a round of applause and thank you very much it's gratifying to see all of you here the constraints
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