Because people don’t choose random passwords. They choose rememberable 
passwords.  If everyone was using a password manager there wouldn’t be such an 
issue as they do produce random password strings.

Mark
-- 
Mark Andrews

> El 15 sept 2025, a las 8:07, Vasilenko Eduard via NANOG 
> <[email protected]> escribió:
> 
> If it is so easy to enforce long enough and random enough passwords,
> Then why did IT people move to hashes with much lower speed?
> 
> Take, for example, 16 really random letters (on keyboard), then the time to 
> check all MD5s would go to 9.2B years (for the same 8 cards "NVIDIA GeForce 
> RTX 5090").
> Even if the attacker gets access to 100k of "NVIDIA GeForce RTX 5090", it is 
> still 0.72M years.
> 16 random letters are definitely enough for the purpose.
> Ed/
> -----Original Message-----
> From: Jay Acuna via NANOG <[email protected]>
> Sent: Friday, September 12, 2025 18:17
> To: North American Network Operators Group <[email protected]>
> Cc: Jay Acuna <[email protected]>
> Subject: Re: MD5 is too fast
> 
>> On Thu, Sep 11, 2025 at 10:17 AM nanog--- via NANOG <[email protected]> 
>> wrote:
>> 
> 
> See; The simple policy of:  Routing protocol keys are to be created using 
> "pwgen 85"  or at least "pwgen 38".
> Never create a key by hand.  This rule preferably applies to all `passwords' 
> sent over the network or keys which secure a network protocol,  even if 
> encrypted transport is used, and even if hashed.
> 
>> Have you calculated how long it should take to test all 80-bit passwords? 
>> 200-bit passwords? 2000-bit passwords?
> A password with 80bits randomness or entropy (An ~11-character properly 
> generated random password) contains  2^80 = 1208925819614629174706176  
> possibilities.
> 
> If you can make 1 Trillion guesses per second, then it takes on average  
> 19167  years to crack.
> That is the expectation if the hash is secure.
> You divide the number of possibilities  by (two times the number of guesses 
> per second)*86400*365.
> Current hardware gets you 80 million guesses per second per GPU for about 
> $1800 per node, So the 1 trillion guesses per second is 12,500 hardware nodes 
> obtainable by spending approximately $22.5 million.
> 
> At that rate you need approximately 10 years'  worth of brute forcing before 
> you have a >= 0.1% chance of guessing it randomly.
> 
> Each additional bit doubles the figures  up to approximately 128 bits.
> Where you are looking at a 5395141535403007094 years to crack on average.
> Adding bits will eventually reach the problem that your hashing algorithm 
> only maps inputs to 256 bits of output,  so the adversary could guess a 
> different password from yours which happens to hash to the same value as the 
> correct one.
> 
>> Suppose that a good server can try about a billion passwords per second. How 
>> long do you think it takes to try all the passwords?
> --
> -JA
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