Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 23 Jul 2003 20:47:53 +1000 | Subject | Re: 2.4.22-pre7: are security issues solved? | From | Herbert Xu <> |
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On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 03:35:05AM -0700, David S. Miller wrote: > > If I know your password is 7 characters I have a smaller > space of passwords to search to just brute-force it.
It's much smaller if you didn't know that it was at most 7 characters long. However, if you did know the upper bound, or you were just brute forcing all passwords starting from 1 character, then the difference is relatively minor. This is because
n + n^2 + n^3 + n^4 + n^5 + n^6
is much smaller than n^7 where n is something like 62 for a reasonable password.
So if your password was broken using this method, then it's probably too short anyway. -- Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 is out! ( http://www.debian.org/ ) Email: Herbert Xu ~{PmV>HI~} <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au> Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/ PGP Key: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/pubkey.txt - To unsubscribe from this list: send the line "unsubscribe linux-kernel" in the body of a message to majordomo@vger.kernel.org More majordomo info at http://vger.kernel.org/majordomo-info.html Please read the FAQ at http://www.tux.org/lkml/
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