I'd rather not accept a false dilemma. There is no reason to have either of the options presented, as both are bad.
* * *ASB* *http://XeeMe.com/AndrewBaker* *Harnessing the Advantages of Technology for the SMB market… * On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 2:49 PM, Crawford, Scott <crawfo...@evangel.edu>wrote: > I'd rather have "good" passwords written down on a sticky note > accessible only to a limited number of coworkers than "bad" passwords that > can be exploited by any black-hat on the internet. > > Sent from my Windows Phone > ------------------------------ > From: Heaton, Joseph@DFG > Sent: 3/15/2012 11:07 AM > To: NT System Admin Issues > Subject: RE: Worth some consideration... > > > Wait… I’m NOT supposed to write my password on a sticky note? How am I > supposed to let my coworker use my login, then? > > > > Joe Heaton > > ITB – Windows Server Support > > > > *From:* Andrew S. Baker [mailto:asbz...@gmail.com] > *Sent:* Thursday, March 15, 2012 7:49 AM > *To:* Heaton, Joseph@DFG; NT System Admin Issues > *Subject:* Re: Worth some consideration... > > > > That's an implementation problem. > > > > If I choose a passphrase of "Mary had a little lamb" then of course that > will be relatively weak as passphrases go. That that is not an inherent > weakness of passphrases, but of people. > > > > Lots of things are undermined by poor choices. Completely random 20 > character passwords with a unicode character set are undermined by having > them posted on sticky notes. > > > > We didn't need a whole article to point that out. > > > > *ASB* > > *http://XeeMe.com/AndrewBaker* > > *Harnessing the Advantages of Technology for the SMB market…* > > > > On Thu, Mar 15, 2012 at 10:12 AM, Kurt Buff <kurt.b...@gmail.com> wrote: > > > http://arstechnica.com/business/news/2012/03/passphrases-only-marginally-more-secure-than-passwords-because-of-poor-choices.ars > > By Dan Goodin > Ars Technica > March 14, 2012 > > Passwords that contain multiple words aren't as resistant as some > researchers expected to certain types of cracking attacks, mainly > because users frequently pick phrases that occur regularly in everyday > speech, a recently published paper concludes. > > Security managers have long regarded passphrases as an > easy-to-remember way to pack dozens of characters into the string that > must be entered to access online accounts or to unlock private > encryption keys. The more characters, the thinking goes, the harder it > is for attackers to guess or otherwise crack the code, since there are > orders of magnitude more possible combinations. > > But a pair of computer scientists from Cambridge University has found > that a significant percentage of passphrases used in a real-world > scenario were easy to guess. Using a dictionary containing 20,656 > phrases of movie titles, sports team names, and other proper nouns, > they were able to find about 8,000 passphrases chosen by users of > Amazon's now-defunct PayPhrase system. That's an estimated 1.13 > percent of the available accounts. The promise of passphrases' > increased entropy, it seems, was undone by many users' tendency to > pick phrases that are staples of the everyday lexicon. > > "Our results suggest that users aren't able to choose phrases made of > completely random words, but are influenced by the probability of a > phrase occurring in natural language," researchers Joseph Bonneau and > Ekaterina Shutova wrote in the paper (PDF), which is titled > "Linguistic properties of multi-word passphrases." "Examining the > surprisingly weak distribution of phrases in natural language, we can > conclude that even 4-word phrases probably provide less than 30 bits > of security which is insufficient against offline attack," the paper > says. > > [...] > > > ~ Finally, powerful endpoint security that ISN'T a resource hog! ~ ~ <http://www.sunbeltsoftware.com/Business/VIPRE-Enterprise/> ~ --- To manage subscriptions click here: http://lyris.sunbelt-software.com/read/my_forums/ or send an email to listmana...@lyris.sunbeltsoftware.com with the body: unsubscribe ntsysadmin
