> It mentions both dictionaries and common words actually.

You are right. The author did mention using combination of common words. 
However, I am very, very suspect of his numbers.

In his example of the word "orange", he says it takes 3 minutes using common 
words to crack. Yet, in his example of "alpine fun" he says it would take two 
months and "this is fun" would take over 2,500 years. This is about right, 
mathematically, but I suggest in practice, this is not the case. We use a 
dictionary, either of all words or common words so that we don't have to go 
through all theoretical possibilities. Therefore, trying to run an attack with 
all possible combinations of all entries in the dictionary is a non-optimal 
approach. I suggest using a "common phrase" dictionary instead. I bet that 
would be quite efficient and cracking "this is fun" would only take days, if 
not hours.

And for those who know me well, yes, I think I know just how to do it. :-)

--
Alberto Treviño
BYU Testing Center
Brigham Young University
[email protected]
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