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Re:Partial password usability sucks by inetknght on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @03:04PM (#19322233)
Not only that, but enumerating all possible combinations of 4 or 5 characters from a 20 character password would be untenable.
Re:Partial password usability sucks by munk-a on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @03:15PM (#19322324)
Also, if all those combinations were stored would the software use separate salts for each one? Well designed software would but I suspect anyone intelligent enough to consider that would also raise a loud voice at the meeting where this feature was being discussed. They probably use a common salt and if it's known how long (at most) each partial password is (say 5 characters) it's super trivial to generate a rainbow table to break it.

Honestly, even if the salting was done independently per chunk, the fact that you know each chunk is under 5 characters long massively reduces the time to generate a rainbow table to verify the password, even more so if the entry field only allows 36 character entry.

Re:Partial password usability sucks by dickeytk on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @10:45PM (#19325375)
Again, not defending this I'm just being technical. You wouldn't need every permutation. 100 is probably plenty.
Re:Partial password usability sucks by myhf on Wednesday March 06, 2019 @07:45PM (#19324593)
20 choose 5 = 15504. You could enumerate them all in less than a second and store all the hashes in less than a megabyte.