Privacy

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A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.

Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.

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How secure does your computer user login password need to be and why? (lemmy.ml)

submitted 3 months ago by SentientFishbowl@lemmy.ml to c/privacy@lemmy.ml

43 comments fedilink hide all child comments

I'm aware of what constitutes a decent password, but typing in 15-30 random characters each time I lock my computer screen is starting to get a bit taxing.

How secure does my user password really need to be and what are the threats to it? Does the same apply to a root-enabled user as a "regular" user when it comes to password security?

For context, my threat model doesn't need to account for real people breaking in and accessing my computer, the damage would be very contained.

Bonus question - what are the risks of having a weak password on a root user on a spare laptop on the same network as my main device that is used exclusively for web browsing? Thanks.

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[–] EherNicht 10 points 3 months ago (1 children)

Not at all. If you think about security like if a thief was to steal your data then the only thing protecting you would be disk encryption. A password for login won’t prevent someone from taking your disk.

[–] EherNicht 5 points 3 months ago* (last edited 3 months ago)

A password without disk encryption is useless. If you mean your super user password however this should be secure of course.