Last week, I tried to register for a service and was really surprised by a password limit of 16 characters. Why on earth yould you impose such strict limits? Never heard of correct horse battery staple?
this post was submitted on 18 Aug 2024
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The longer it is, the harder for anyone to guess, write down, remember, or brute force. For that long a password, someone can actually see my password and then have effectively zero chance of being able to use it.
But maybe it’s more a ”why not?” In one side it’s generated so you can use it equally well, and in the other side it should be hashed to a standard length so they should be able to manage it equally well.
When I did the math with a reasonable list of alphanums and symbols on a US standard keyboard, a 40 char randomly generated password had equivalent security to a 256 but block cipher key. Describing the difficulty in brute forcing that starts with the phrase "assume you can convert all the energy from a supernova at 100% efficiency into a thermodynamiclly perfect computer". A roundabout way of saying impossible.
40 chars random is already overkill.