Your Password Is Not Secure

Overview

Objectives/Goals The purpose of this experiment is to determine what type of password is most #secure#, where type is classified by character set and length. Methods/Materials The testing was done by scripting my computer (Dual 2 GHz #PowerPC 970 (2.2)# processors, 2GB DDR SDRAM) to generate and cycle through character strings. Various scripts used different parameters to generate different types of character strings. The parameters were character set and length: 1) lengths varied from one to eight characters, and 2) the character sets were numeric, alpha, alpha + caps, alpha-numeric, alpha-numeric + symbols, and all typeable ASCII characters. The scripts also timed themselves. Results The scripts that took the longest time to cycle through used larger character sets, versus only a longer string. For example, all combinations of six numeric characters takes half as much time to cycle through compared to three characters in the alpha-numeric + symbols character set. Conclusions/Discussion In password security, the size of the character sets plays a greater role than the length of the password. More secure passwords contain many different types of characters.

Competition history

• CSEF 2006 Mathematics & Software · Entry J1215

Resources

• CSEF project summary ↗

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