Originally
posted by
Gut:
Actually, its far more safer to have a password oomposed of three words or numbers you can remember. Like RhinoFallWine86
No it's not.
It's a safe assumption that the vast majority of people will choose words from their own language, and that this language is not difficult to determine. In my case, English.
There's right around 200,000 words in English... but most people's working vocabularies are between 5,000 and 6,000 words. Since the whole point of choosing words is to make them easier to remember, it seems reasonable to assume that the words will have to come out of this working vocabulary.
6,000^3 = 216,000,000,000 possibilities.
With a number included (let's say anywhere from 1-100 since yours was 86), 216,000,000,000 * 100 = 21,600,000,000,000 possibilities.
But, of course, we can't assume placement of the number, it could be at the beginning or between words too, so 21,600,000,000,000 * 4 = 86,400,000,000,000
Now, for comparison, a randomly generated 8 character password has 26 letters, 10 digits, and 32 special characters to choose from (I just counted the characters I can get on my standard qwerty keyboard with one key stroke, or shift+1 key stroke).
That's 68 characters.
The standard length of a password is 8 characters.
68^8 = 457,163,239,653,376 possibilities.
This means that a standard 8 character random password is right around 5 times as secure as your suggestion. Of course, no one suggests 8 character password, the most common suggestion for anyone security minded is a 12 character random password.
68^12 = 9.775*10^21
That's a little over 100,000x as many options as your method.
-Fooglmog
Guy with no clue.