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A comment on The man who wrote the book on password management regrets the error. Parent comment

Re:The man who wrote the book on password management regrets... by jeremy_wiebe on Wednesday August 09, 2017 @10:24PM (#14975796)
Asking because I really don't know: How do they know that a given hash is multi-word passphrase versus average joe's single "word" character jumble?

If they flip to using words as part of their alphabet and I'm using 4 unique words, they still have a large search space because the English language has so many more words than the alphabet has letters.

So do they just do both? Seems like a huge expansion in computational work.

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Re:The man who wrote the book on password management regrets... by Bromskloss on Sunday August 20, 2017 @06:26PM (#15060555)
They might not know and might have to guess, or do both. This makes it harder for them, but it's hard to quantify how much harder, so it's reasonable to assume the worst case, i.e. that they do know the procedure with which you generated the password.
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