How to securely encrypt a file with an insecure password in Rust

Re:How to securely encrypt a file with an insecure password ... by staticassertion on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @04:07PM (#30000148)

I think the short answer is "don't be in a dictionary". Using a unique password is critically important.

Let's imagine that you increased the time by 10x. That's 277 hours for a password. That's not very long at all - 12 days. Even if you increased by 100x, 120 days is not crazy, and presumably attackers can go way faster than your assumption.

A KDF isn't going to be enough to save you if you're using a top 100k password and the attacker can bruteforce offline.

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Re:How to securely encrypt a file with an insecure password ... by tptacek on Wednesday January 19, 2022 @06:11PM (#30001824)

"Don't be in a dictionary" is trivially easy to solve with generated passphrases: just pick a bunch of random words and string them together. You can generate an arbitrary amount of "entropy" this way.

Of course, users won't do this for themselves, which is why tools that do passphrase encryption should generate passwords by default, and accept user-provided passwords only as a non-default option.

Passphrases still have value, even when they're long strings of words: they're easy to write down, easy to repeat aloud, and easier than a random string to "recognize" visually.

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