As the saying goes, there's no fixing stupid.  :)

 - William


On Mon, Jul 1, 2013 at 9:56 AM, Edward Ned Harvey (lopser) <
[email protected]> wrote:

> > From: [email protected] [mailto:[email protected]]
> > On Behalf Of William J. Robbins
> >
> > At the end of the day if someone knows enough to bother encrypting their
> > system in the first place they know to use a decent passphrase...
>
> I must disagree.   :-)   I mean,  :-(
>
> Without any wrench, using a typical home PC and completely unintelligent
> brute force, you can get through ~ 2^43 password guesses in ~ a week.
>  Users often times disclose their passwords voluntarily, just based on
> trust.  And as described in http://xkcd.com/936/ most users choose
> "strong" passwords that they keep secret, that are guessable within the
> first ~ 2^28 guesses.
>
> Equally bad, I've seen companies where IT deployed TrueCrypt whole-disk
> protection to all their users, with the same password.  6 characters.
>
> Users often choose 6 or 8 char passwords ... Heck, I've systems that
> *don't accept* passwords longer than 8 chars.  (They let you type in more
> than 8, but it gets truncated at 8, so "ObamaAreEvil" == "ObamaAreGreat")
>
> Even if a 7 char password was completely random and memorized (it never
> is; because it's got the kid's name or dog's name or something) then it
> would still be 41 bits.
>
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