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Apple Passwords’ generated strong password format

(rmondello.com)
430 points tambourine_man | 1 comments | 18 Oct 24 11:12 UTC | HN request time: 0.202s | source
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chrisshroba ◴[18 Oct 24 14:31 UTC] No.41879813[source]▶
71 bits of entropy feels rather low...

It seems like many recommendations are to use at least 75-100, or even 128. Being fairly conservative, if you had 10k hosts hashing 1B passwords a second, it would take 7.5 years worst case to crack [1]. If a particular site neglects to use a slow hash function and salting, it's easy to imagine bad actors precomputing rainbow tables that would make attacks relatively easy.

You can rebut that that's still a crazy amount of computation needed, but since it's reusable, I find it easy to believe it's already being done. For comparison, if the passwords have 100 bits of entropy, it would take those same 10k servers over 4 billion years to crack the password.

[1]: (2*71 / 1e9 / 10000 / (606024*365)) ≈ 7.5

replies(2): >>41879897 #>>41886162 #
1. andreareina ◴[19 Oct 24 06:59 UTC] No.41886162[source]▶
If you have an adversary that can afford to tie up 10k servers each capable of doing gigahash per second for 7.5 years go ahead and use a stronger password. And while you're at it you better buy the best physical security that money can buy.