On 7/18/06, Depp, Dennis M. <deppdm@ornl.gov> wrote:
Do you audit for attempts using brute force to guess passwords? What
you are describing is a brute force password attempt using well known
pass phrases. A better pass phase might be something personal like. "I
have three children and a beautiful wife who stands 5' 7"." This will
be difficult to guess and will not be found in Bartlett's Book of
Quotations.
in the end, it comes down to what you are trying to protect and how
much you are going to protect it. Having done a lot of brute-force
password checking with phrases and such.. it was pretty quick (I think
about 48 hours) to find "The Cat in the Hat is Back" through a long
list of various phrases and words. However all it took was to
misspell Hat as Hta and it was functionally longer than I wanted to
wait for the secondary dictionary attacks (misspellings, changing
e->3, etc) could find it.
I would say that having a phrase+complexity test is a good advice. The
complexity test can be the addition of numbers, special characters etc
that are not at the beginning and end of the phrase and there are
several 'modules' prewritten for many password programs to test for
this.
However, my main advice is for a site that is looking for better
security to use a one time passwords, lockouts, and end-to-end
authentication. A one time password system usually requires some sort
of 'two-factor' device (secureid, cryptocard, etc) and helps make it
that the password is not guessable.
--
Stephen J Smoogen.
CSIRT/Linux System Administrator
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