[Info-vax] password strength (Re: VMS humor)

[Craig A. Berry]

On 12/31/20 12:29 AM, John Reagan wrote:

> The phrase "King Philip fried a pheasant on Friday!" is 7 words out of a dictionary full of words.
> The distribution is quite predictable as each English word (yes, there are a few exceptions known
> to Scrabble players) contains at least one vowel.   

But unless the entire phrase is in someone's password cracking
dictionary, the fact that portions contain well-known words doesn't
really make any difference, does it? If it did, delimiting with
non-space characters would take care of that.

> How did you determine 189?

I did a quick web search and found this:

<http://rumkin.com/tools/password/passchk.php>

which is also something the XKCD entry below points to.

> I'm not in the XKCD camp and fall in with Steve Gibson.
> 
> https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/936:_Password_Strength

The point of that is that length works better than funny characters at
increasing entropy.  Which was essentially my point as well.