Comment by bdonvr@thelemmy.club on Massive data dump containing millions of passwords sparks security alert: Is your data safe?

Use a password manager. Every account gets a different (and strong) password.

Obviously any reputable password manager is better than none at all, but I strongly recommend using KeepassXC on the desktop and a suitable mobile client for phones and tablets, and syncing the database across devices with an encrypted peer to peer sync tool like Synching.

I’ve always been nervous about being part of a large, juicy cloud hosted target, and LastPass was the proof that those concerns are well-founded.

Yep. If you’ve got the technical knowledge and a server, self hosting Bitwarden is quite easy. And your vault is end to end encrypted.

KeepassDX for mobile is on F-Droid and can use the same file as accessed from KeepassXC from Laptop, synced by Syncthing.

I can also recommend Keepass2Android, which I’ve been using for years.

All cool and dandy, until you have to type that random 50 letter string on your TV.

Many PW managers let you generate passphrases, which are all around better than random strings. Length is the most important factor so

finance-caffeine-utopia-redress-unseen

Is way stronger and easier to remember (and type) than

Fl7$j4FWw)&5O

Huh, TIL. I had no idea that was an option but that’s super useful for things I need to type in on a device with no keyboard, or even things I can’t access my password manager for. Thanks for the protip there!

And pass phrases are faster to type and with less typos even though they need more characters than passwords to be the same secure.

Is it really safer? I mean when trying to bruteforce a password, one would have to make a guess whether it’s a passphrase or not. But if you decided to check for pass phrases, wouldn’t the one you posted be cracked in 5 times the amount of words in that dictionary? I’m not sure how large the vocabularies of the generators are, but I would guess a random 17 char password might be safer than a 5 phrases password?

but I would guess a random 17 char password might be safer than a 5 phrases password

And you would be very wrong about that. A 5 phrase password has entropy. “finance-caffeine-utopia-redress-unseen” is 28 characters. If you add in a different symbol between the words and add a number somewhere, this password becomes incredibly difficult to brute force.

I’ll let xkcd explain it better.

Youre right,different separators, numbers and even capital letters change my theory alot

It’d be dictionary length to the fifth power, not times five.

You don’t need to make it that long.

And also most TVs or whatever you’re streaming with has a way to type from your phone nowadays. Apple TV, Chromecast, Android TV, heck I think even Xbox.

It’s kinda nice on Apple TV your phone will suggest autofill passwords for the TV, even from theirs party password managers like Bitwarden.

Android tv’s arent that old. 10 years max. 5 years since it’s affordable for most people. Is it unreasonable to own a 5 year old non-smart tv? I think not. I think it’s weird that so many people assume everyone owns a smart tv.

In what scenario would you need to type in a password on a non-smart TV though? Parental lock?

You’re not wrong but in what context would you be putting in passwords on a non-smart device

Also it’s not just smart TVs. You can hook up streaming sticks and boxes and game consoles to anything with an HDMI port

I had to do that recently, ended up being easier to just temporarily change the password to something short on a pc, then change it back after.

For symmetric keys, since they cannot be weakened using quantum computing, their strength can be assessed by their bit-equivalent amount of entropy:

40 bit or less - easily breakable
64 bit - not so easy, but doable
128 bit or more - basically unbreakable

Those are equivalent to, respectively:

0-9 - 12, 19, 38 characters
a-z - 9, 14, 28 characters
a-z0-9 - 8, 12, 25 characters
A-Za-z0-9 - 7, 11, 22 characters
A-Za-z0-9+special - 7, 10, 21 characters

Moral of the story: drop the special characters, and even the numbers… and even the uppercase. A 30+ character long all-lowercase pass phrase, is already unbreakable.

Check @falsemirror@beehaw.org:

finance-caffeine-utopia-redress ~~-unseen~~

…is already over 128 bits.

PS: Correct horse battery staple

Additionally, I use simplelogin so they also gotta match unique passwords with my unique emails and then get past 2fa.

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