Enforce Full or Selective Complexity on Passwords?
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At eight characters, a brute force attack is pretty easy. It takes hours for a good desktop to crack. Go to sixteen and super computers can't do it in a week.
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How common is a brute force attack on AD? How would it work?
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But I want to thank you @scottalanmiller for that thread from before as it helped me with this customer and I could talk to them and feel confident about what I was saying.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
How common is a brute force attack on AD? How would it work?
Honestly, the biggest threat is always internal. If a company doesn't have any public facing servers, the chances for an attack even being possible are slim. Having strong passwords was always most important to prevent employees from using each others' passwords, or figuring them out.
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@Carnival-Boy said:
How common is a brute force attack on AD? How would it work?
Relatively common and yes, it works. The way that it is normally done is not through the LDAP interface but offline against a copy f the database. Most users in "complexity enforced" environments can be cracked in minutes.
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@thanksaj said:
@Carnival-Boy said:
How common is a brute force attack on AD? How would it work?
Honestly, the biggest threat is always internal. If a company doesn't have any public facing servers, the chances for an attack even being possible are slim. Having strong passwords was always most important to prevent employees from using each others' passwords, or figuring them out.
And against password hash shipping.
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@coliver said:
Never got this image. Use 4 random words and now dictionary attack doesn't work?
Also whatever happened to use scary passwords but use Lastpass or Keepass to hold all that crap passwords?
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@technobabble said:
@coliver said:
Never got this image. Use 4 random words and now dictionary attack doesn't work?
Also whatever happened to use scary passwords but use Lastpass or Keepass to hold all that crap passwords?
LastPass isn't for everything. You can't login to Windows with LastPass. There are a lot of things you can't use LastPass for.
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@thanksaj you can use your phone to access lastpass and see a note that tells you what the windows password is.
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One day I will forget my KeePass master password and my life will be over
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@technobabble said:
@thanksaj you can use your phone to access lastpass and see a note that tells you what the windows password is.
Yeah, you could. But what happens on the day you forget your cellphone? What you're describing is kind of a h4x0r way of using LastPass. Not really how it was meant to be used. Or what it was meant to be used for.
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@thanksaj said:
@technobabble said:
@thanksaj you can use your phone to access lastpass and see a note that tells you what the windows password is.
Yeah, you could. But what happens on the day you forget your cellphone? What you're describing is kind of a h4x0r way of using LastPass. Not really how it was meant to be used. Or what it was meant to be used for.
Says who...it has notes for a reason. But just because you don't approve of the product being used that way doesn't mean it can't be used that way. Personal preference is just personal.
Also can anyone comment on the 4 words and how they beat a dictionary attack, thanks.
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@technobabble said:
@thanksaj said:
@technobabble said:
@thanksaj you can use your phone to access lastpass and see a note that tells you what the windows password is.
Yeah, you could. But what happens on the day you forget your cellphone? What you're describing is kind of a h4x0r way of using LastPass. Not really how it was meant to be used. Or what it was meant to be used for.
Says who...it has notes for a reason. But just because you don't approve of the product being used that way doesn't mean it can't be used that way. Personal preference is just personal.
Also can anyone comment on the 4 words and how they beat a dictionary attack, thanks.
From my knowledge a dictionary attack goes through every word in its dictionary from a-z to identify the password. It would then have to go through every word it its dictionary coupled with every other word in its dictionary. Depending on the size of the dictionary (huge) it needs to find 4 words that match to meet the password. The combinations would be in the... hundreds of trillions? I haven't done permutations in awhile so someone who is good at math should check my work.
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@technobabble said:
@thanksaj said:
@technobabble said:
@thanksaj you can use your phone to access lastpass and see a note that tells you what the windows password is.
Yeah, you could. But what happens on the day you forget your cellphone? What you're describing is kind of a h4x0r way of using LastPass. Not really how it was meant to be used. Or what it was meant to be used for.
Says who...it has notes for a reason. But just because you don't approve of the product being used that way doesn't mean it can't be used that way. Personal preference is just personal.
Also can anyone comment on the 4 words and how they beat a dictionary attack, thanks.
Like I said, it's certainly one way to apply the features they've built into their products, but it's not really LastPass doing something special. There are plenty of places you can store secure notes. I wasn't saying you were wrong if you did that. I'm just saying that if someone at LastPass was trying to convince you why you should use their product, you wouldn't hear that mentioned as a reason.
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@coliver said:
@technobabble said:
@thanksaj said:
@technobabble said:
@thanksaj you can use your phone to access lastpass and see a note that tells you what the windows password is.
Yeah, you could. But what happens on the day you forget your cellphone? What you're describing is kind of a h4x0r way of using LastPass. Not really how it was meant to be used. Or what it was meant to be used for.
Says who...it has notes for a reason. But just because you don't approve of the product being used that way doesn't mean it can't be used that way. Personal preference is just personal.
Also can anyone comment on the 4 words and how they beat a dictionary attack, thanks.
From my knowledge a dictionary attack goes through every word in its dictionary from a-z to identify the password. It would then have to go through every word it its dictionary coupled with every other word in its dictionary. Depending on the size of the dictionary (huge) it needs to find 4 words that match to meet the password. The combinations would be in the... hundreds of trillions? I haven't done permutations in awhile so someone who is good at math should check my work.
Yeah, the English language is pretty large, and always growing thanks to new words that are invented and words from other languages we just adopt. So it could very easily be trillions of possibilities.
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Dictionaries can still be used with long passwords but they become much more complex. Things like spaces add to that. And any complexity like punctuation does too. It defeats dictionary attacks the same way that long strings always make guessing harder.
Complexity does not impact a dictionary attack unless you are using random characters which defeats human memorization.
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@scottalanmiller said:
Dictionaries can still be used with long passwords but they become much more complex. Things like spaces add to that. And any complexity like punctuation does too. It defeats dictionary attacks the same way that long strings always make guessing harder.
Complexity does not impact a dictionary attack unless you are using random characters which defeats human memorization.
Post-It under the keyboard anyone?
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@coliver said:
@technobabble said:
@thanksaj said:
@technobabble said:
@thanksaj you can use your phone to access lastpass and see a note that tells you what the windows password is.
Yeah, you could. But what happens on the day you forget your cellphone? What you're describing is kind of a h4x0r way of using LastPass. Not really how it was meant to be used. Or what it was meant to be used for.
Says who...it has notes for a reason. But just because you don't approve of the product being used that way doesn't mean it can't be used that way. Personal preference is just personal.
Also can anyone comment on the 4 words and how they beat a dictionary attack, thanks.
From my knowledge a dictionary attack goes through every word in its dictionary from a-z to identify the password. It would then have to go through every word it its dictionary coupled with every other word in its dictionary. Depending on the size of the dictionary (huge) it needs to find 4 words that match to meet the password. The combinations would be in the... hundreds of trillions? I haven't done permutations in awhile so someone who is good at math should check my work.
Ah ha...well now that makes sense to me...thanks for taking the time to share!
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@thanksaj said:
@technobabble said:
@thanksaj said:
@technobabble said:
@thanksaj you can use your phone to access lastpass and see a note that tells you what the windows password is.
Yeah, you could. But what happens on the day you forget your cellphone? What you're describing is kind of a h4x0r way of using LastPass. Not really how it was meant to be used. Or what it was meant to be used for.
Says who...it has notes for a reason. But just because you don't approve of the product being used that way doesn't mean it can't be used that way. Personal preference is just personal.
Also can anyone comment on the 4 words and how they beat a dictionary attack, thanks.
Like I said, it's certainly one way to apply the features they've built into their products, but it's not really LastPass doing something special. There are plenty of places you can store secure notes. I wasn't saying you were wrong if you did that. I'm just saying that if someone at LastPass was trying to convince you why you should use their product, you wouldn't hear that mentioned as a reason.
Why are you still arguing with me about my personal preference? I never mentioned that LastPass tried to convince me of anything. Can we move on?
