Messages in this thread | | | Date | Wed, 23 Jul 2003 20:59:03 +1000 | Subject | Re: 2.4.22-pre7: are security issues solved? | From | Herbert Xu <> |
| |
On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 03:50:22AM -0700, David S. Miller wrote: > > > 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. > > "7" in my example is an arbitrary number, increase it to any larger > number you like.
Well, as m gets larger, the number
(n + n^2 + ... + n^(m-1)) / n^m
tends to 1 / (n - 1).
In other words, if you can break n^m, then you can probably break
n + n^2 + ... + n^m
Anyway, I'm not that bothered with making /proc/tty/driver root-only, even if it is only for what seems to me to be dubious reasons. -- 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/
| |