Subject:
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Re: Password Tips
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Newsgroups:
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lugnet.admin.general
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Date:
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Wed, 27 Sep 2000 22:02:33 GMT
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Viewed:
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313 times
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[Reposted with corrections. I read the results incorrectly; the basepoint
for passing is 100%, not 0%.]
In lugnet.people, Todd Lehman writes:
> [...] There are plenty of 6-character pw's that you can use that have
> 5 letters and one number or special character, and plenty of 7-character
> pw's that you can use that are all lowercase letters. [...]
I shouldn't be wasting my time disspelling FUD like this, but as long as I
said the above, I should really define what I mean by "there are plenty"...
On the default fussiness level of 2, statistical analysis (running on the
real thing, mind you, not just doing combinatorics) shows that it passes 31%
of all randomly-generated 7-character pw's generated from the input domain of
lowercase letters a-z, for a sample size of several thousand randomly
generated pw's. In other words, if you type in 7 random all-lowercase
letters, there is about a 1/3 chance that the pw you choose will pass.
Similarly, it passes 65% of all randomly-generated 6-character pw's where
5 of the characters are lowercase letters a-z and 1 character is any ASCII
character in the range 33-127 minus a-z. In other words, about 1 in 3 fails.
Thus, you can indeed use regular letters (or numbers), and you do not have
to avoid them at all costs.
:-p
--Todd
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