Password Security: Technical Tips

Our previous blog post covered some great general tips on password security. For those who are looking for more technical and mathematical details on password security, we provide great insight on dark web searching, password entropy, and a tip from a cybersecurity researcher in this blog.

Checking the dark web

While constantly checking the dark web for your compromised password can be daunting, there are many services that provide dark web searching for your password for free. Running these dark web scans from time to time can help check for any compromised password on the dark web. Studies show that 83% of people would not know whether their information was on the dark web.

Good password entropy

For the more technical people, you should be focusing on password entropy for creating a password. Password entropy is the “unpredictability” of a password or how hard it is for a computer to predict the next character in a password. Note that strong password entropy will only help to prevent brute force attacks, one of the most popular techniques at “cracking” a password. Entropy is calculated by log base 2 of the password space. The password space is the total number of possible passwords. A higher entropy (40+) can ensure that your password will not be compromised by a brute force attack. An entropy of 40+ would take over 30 years to crack at 1000 password attempts a second.

Tips From a Cybersecurity Researcher

Randomly generated passwords are not always the best solution. While randomly generated passwords expand the number of possibilities, making brute force more difficult, they are not always the best passwords. Randomly generated passwords are nearly impossible to remember and ultimately easy to forget. Try creating a passphrase that is relevant to you that is easy to remember such as grilledChickenSandwich. grilledChickenSandwich is easy to remember, but nearly impossible for a computer to guess. Following the same equation for entropy, we calculate an entropy of 17 bits per word with a dictionary size of 170,000. 170,000 is the number of “current use” words in the English dictionary. For reference, grilledChickenSandwich has an entropy of 51, making it an extremely strong password.