The Code Files

The Economics of Password Cracking

We know that it's possible to come up with a password that no computer on earth can crack. Use true random data to generate a sequence of 20 characters from the full ASCII printable set, spend an hour memorizing, and you're good. We also know that most people don't do that. What we don't know (or at least often forget) is that people don't need to do that.

We estimate our password strength by the amount of time it would take the fastest imaginable supercomputer to search through the set of all passwords of equal or less length and find ours. What we often forget is that the bad guys don't have those kinds of resources, and they rarely ever crack passwords via brute-force search.

Why not? Because most bad guys won't build a billion-dollar supercomputer to crack one password, and most people with billion-dollar supercomputers aren't willing to rent out their processing power for password cracking. It isn't profitable, and those supercomputers can be used for better things like scientific research.

The Bitcoin network is currently computing 11.74 trillion sha256 hashes per second (see here for current stats). The network will compute 3.702x10^20 hashes in one year if it continues at it the same rate (my guess is that it will grow, but it's already over 10 times as powerful as the fastest known supercomputer). That may seem like a lot of hashes, but if you do the math, you'll see that its not even enough to do a brute-force search through the set of all 11-character ASCII passwords. log(3.702x1020)/log(95) = 10.40

Read it again: The Bitcoin network is made up of millions of dollars worth of hardware and is 10x faster than the fastest known supercomputer, but it can not brute-force guess an 11-character password in a year.

There is no business model that makes brute-force password cracking profitable. To see why, consider the following argument:

If the password can't be cracked with good quality dictionaries or rainbow tables, it is long and complex.
Since the fastest distributed computing network on earth can barely search through the set of all 10-character ASCII passwords in a year, the probability of cracking a long and complex password via brute-force search in a reasonable amount of time is low.
Since the probability of successfully cracking a password via brute-force is low, to make any money, you must charge the customer even if you cannot crack it.
Since the probability of successfully cracking a password via brute-force is low, and the customer must pay even if you cannot crack it, the customer will not be willing to pay very much.
A decent brute-force attack requires a lot of time on an expensive supercomputer, so you must charge a lot.
(4) and (5) are incompatible with each other, so it is impossible to run a profitable brute-force cracking business.

Of course (4) may not hold true when the customer is a government and the password is the key to winning a war, but most passwords don't have that much value.

What this tells us is that we don't need to worry about brute-force attacks. They always succeed (by definition), but rarely in a reasonable amount of time and there is rarely ever a password valuable enough to justify one.

So ironically, the most profitable kind of password cracking requires very little computational resources (a single 6-core system satisfies crackstation.net's needs). The key to being profitable in the password cracking industry is to be clever and do as much as you can without a supercomputer. That means implementing extremely fast look-up tables and constructing extremely effective dictionaries -- going after the low-hanging fruit.

That's exactly what the bad guys do, and that's exactly what my hash cracking service does. If you want your password to be secure, don't worry about comparing its strength to a hypothetical supercomputer, just make sure it's not a low-hanging fruit, and make brute-force search the only option for your adversary. Then they probably won't even bother trying.

The easiest way to get out of the low-hanging fruit zone is to make your password long. Take a look at GRC's Password Haystacks page for some good advice.

Here's a tip: My hash cracking service is backed by the largest known password cracking dictionary, which has just over 15 billion entries. There are over 7 billion possible 5-character ASCII strings. So if you include 5 random ASCII characters in your password and pad it out to at least 12 characters with something memorable (not a word!), you can be pretty sure that your password isn't a low-hanging fruit.

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