One of my pet peeves about security are people who advocate for ‘strong’ passwords. Everyone knows these people, they’re the tech support person who tells you your password must have a minimum number of characters that you only use when censoring expletives. Even worse, some of them use a random password generator to assign a password to you that you’re unable to change. The argument for this is that if you have a wider range of characters in your password, you have greater entropy and therefore it is harder for your password to be hacked. Now, while there is some truth to that, there are numerous flaws in the logic when using it to determine a good security policy:

1. Most hack attempts are not ‘guesses’

High entropy is great when there is a brute force attempt to gain access. This is where the attacker uses an automated mechanism to repeatedly try different password combinations to try ‘guess’ your password. In the vast majority of cases however, this attempt is never used because it requires a lot of guesses to have a statistically significant chance of succeeding. For attacks across networks (ssh, ftp, http/web), the latency in the network itself, along with simple measures on the service to limit guess attempts means that this sort of brute force attack has no significant chance of succeeding. If the hacker has access to the encrypted password file or database however, then this strategy gains a vastly higher probability of success, since they can attempt this ‘offline’ (that is, on their own system) and the only limiting factor is their own computing resources — the network and service limitations are no longer a factor at all.

2. Most remote hack attempts are dictionary based

So, a common question to #1 above is: “If remote guessing hack attempts are unlikely to succeed, why are there all sorts of authorization failures in my logs?” The answer is that, while there may be some very clueless hackers attempting ‘guesses’, they should just be considered background noise. The vast majority of them are not doing this, they’re using something called a dictionary attack. What this means is that they have a list of very common usernames (root, admin, dave, jane, etc.) and another list of very common passwords (abc123, qwerty, 1q2w3e4r, password, 123456, etc. – yes, people do use these passwords with surprising regularity!). Then they cycle through their usernames and passwords until they get a hit. While the success rate is still very low, it’s nowhere near as low as it should be. This is why you should never use these sorts of passwords. Also, if your name is ‘dave’ or ‘jane’ you might want to change that. 🙂

3. Good security is a complex problem

One thing that ‘strong’ password advocates forget is that there are a number of factors to consider when determining a good security policy. Simply mandating ‘strong’ passwords to users in a draconian fashion ignores something very important: people have bad memories and generally aren’t concerned about security. So, if they’re given a password like ‘6dRre%!_0dc8’ (yes, I’ve dealt with sysadmins who required these sorts of passwords), they’re going to have to do something to remember this beast. Most of the time this means either typing it in a text file on their computer, or writing it down on a sticky note next to their desk. The text file gets into backups, and is distributed around the net when they email it to themselves and the sticky note is often in plain sight! This becomes the security hole, and the policy to make security stronger just had a direct hand in making it weaker.

So, what exactly is a good password, and how is it different or better than simply a strong password?

A good password is one that still has a minimum amount of entropy (simply put, diversity and lots of it), but equally importantly, it is something that you are able to remember without any sort of impossible mental games that only the kid who can solve any Rubik’s 9×9 cube in 30 seconds can do. This Wikipedia article on Password Strength does cover the entropy part quite well, although probably in a way where most people would not understand it or care to read it. However, it also makes some suggestions that are just plain wrong, such as:

Generating passwords randomly where feasible

This is just simply bad advice. While there may be some tiny statistical advantage to ‘random’ passwords — due to the distribution of letters used in most passwords — this advantage is completely lost due to #3 above. Humans are not good at remembering random passwords, so assigning them is a bad practice. It just makes things difficult for them and they will do something that will end up being worse.

Here are some examples of what I would call a good passwords:

99cakes?Yum.Yesplease!

The5thElement,Ilovedthatmovie!

What makes these passwords good? Well, they have a lot of entropy — they’re long and have upper case and lower case letters, punctuation and numbers — and they’re something that I can remember easily. Who wouldn’t like 99 cakes? (ignoring health concerns of course!), and The 5th Element was awesome! Now, ironically, these are now bad passwords, because they were suggested as a good ones on a blog with a focus on security! So, don’t use them, but instead, use something similar that is meaningful for you. You try a couple of them, and use Microsoft’s web tool that checks password strength to see if they hold up.