It turns out that emoticons are considered a symbol, so they can beef up your passwords and make them more secure in combination with letters and numbers. Here’s how.
The whole idea is to make it easier for humans to remember and more difficult to brute force. Long passwords are much harder to brute force than complex passwords with lots of special characters. And they’re a lot easier for humans to remember.
There are enough words in any language that it’s virtually impossible to guess the correct four words, even if they’re in the dictionary.
Even so, most password requirements will force you to add them anyway. Quick way to do it is to just pick a number on a keyboard and add it and the symbol to the end. e.g HorseBattery2# and so on.
And requirements like that are why my password strengths are completely out of whack:
Random websites get 24 randomly generated printable characters stored in my password manager. This is essentially unbreakable with conventional methods and can easily be adapted to fit whichever counterproductive rules the website enforces.
My password manager and my home computers get memorable but long phrases. A particular favorite is to start in the middle of a line from a song and continue from there. Nobody’s going to guess “make you swear and curse when you′re chewing on” but it’s easy to memorize of you already know the song. Even a dictionary attack is going to have trouble with that many words.
My work accounts get the bare minimum that complies with whichever rules the admins came up with. Numbers, special characters and mixed capitalization? No thirty letter phrase for you, then; you’ll get the minimum eight characters so I have a chance of memorizing the thing. Regular password changes? Great, now the last two chargers are going to be incrementing digits, just like for everyone else.
There’s a reason why experts these days argue against anything but minimum length restrictions.
If your strategy is to just use dictionary words your password will have little entropy and even less so if you use grammatically correct sentences. If the attacker knows this is your strategy of choosing passwords cracking one is way easier than cracking a password that has the same length but consists of randomly chosen characters.
Your password is only safe because the attacker doesn’t know your strategy of choosing the password which forces him to use inefficient methods of cracking it, while there would be a more efficient way if he knew the strategy you used. Which is security by obscurity.
Just be sure to throw in symbols and numbers to beef it up. Dictionary words are easier to brute force.
The whole idea is to make it easier for humans to remember and more difficult to brute force. Long passwords are much harder to brute force than complex passwords with lots of special characters. And they’re a lot easier for humans to remember.
There are enough words in any language that it’s virtually impossible to guess the correct four words, even if they’re in the dictionary.
Even so, most password requirements will force you to add them anyway. Quick way to do it is to just pick a number on a keyboard and add it and the symbol to the end. e.g HorseBattery2# and so on.
And requirements like that are why my password strengths are completely out of whack:
There’s a reason why experts these days argue against anything but minimum length restrictions.
You can even make a complete sentence that makes sense with symbols and numbers.
“Ronaldo doesn’t grill 76 Canadian Tacos.”
Or whatever
Not 4 of them in a row. Keep in mind the attacker doesn’t know " look for exactly 4 words"
That’s just security by obscurity. It’s one other strategy of choosing passwords that a bruteforce attack is going to try if it gets popular
That’s not what security by obscurity means. And going by your definition, all passwords are security by obscurity.
If your strategy is to just use dictionary words your password will have little entropy and even less so if you use grammatically correct sentences. If the attacker knows this is your strategy of choosing passwords cracking one is way easier than cracking a password that has the same length but consists of randomly chosen characters.
Your password is only safe because the attacker doesn’t know your strategy of choosing the password which forces him to use inefficient methods of cracking it, while there would be a more efficient way if he knew the strategy you used. Which is security by obscurity.