Why is any amount of years in thousands not green? The matrix is skewed towards orange and red to make it seem riskier. This is a biased graph.
Not to mention the computer specs needed to crack these passwords are not mentioned. A "hacker" still needs libraries of their own to crack anything, which might find the password or might not, and no method is instant.
The ways to crack, at least with brute force, mean it's iterative. You either start with the most common combinations of all numbers or all letters, and then move incrementally. Then start mixing. There are so many combinations that nothing is ever instant.
14 numbers [ = 1014 combinations]: 41 min [ = 2460 s]
This works out to 40 billion guesses per second. Can you calculate 8 password hashes in one 5GHz clock cycle?! If the hash&salt algorithm is any good, rainbow tables will not work, either. You would need the undivided power of some serious botnet to get these times. Not to mention the service would need to be breached for hashes first.
For everything longer than a couple of years, it becomes more relevant what future hardware can do, I think. Would be interesting to see such a table from 20 or 40 years ago.
Yeah imagine saying 69000 years is only 3/5 secure
Everytime I see this graph I focus on the fact that 1 second and 10 months are the same color, but 1 sec and "instant" are different colors.
Like I guess if "instant" is a billionth of a second than it's a greater difference of magnitudes. However, in reality a second feels like an instant.
Everyone knows you are only safe if the hacker needs to run a dozen high-end contemporary GPUs for more than the lifespan of a star to be secure. /s Anyway, you can expect the times to shrink significantly once Si-optical or quantum computers become available in a few decades, although the service will have been discontinued, upgraded to a more robust hashing technique or you will have changed your password by then.
Agreed - frankly even 10 years should be green. Unless you're talking about corporate/government security, no one is tying up a decade of GPU time to crack a single password, not to mention that even a relatively security lax person is likely to have changed their password some time in a decade
So any decent pass phrase would last hundreds, even thousands of years.
Unfortunately, this chart is already out of date, the 2023 version looks like this:It is now the up to date chart.
This uses 12 RTX 4090 GPUs and MD5.For the old chart you would need 40 billion guesses per second, and that is what the RTX 2080 was at five years ago. With a RTX 4090 you can guess 164 billion hashes per second.
Using 8 AWS A100 GPUs at $32.77/h you can guess over 520 billion times a second and then the chart looks like this:
All the charts and benchmark numbers are from here. There is way more on that page that I'm just going to leave out here, but I recommend you read through it.
Of course this isn't quite accurate, this assumes the hashing algorithm MD5 which is no longer recommended, because it's so fast. It also ignores salting. But it assumes the worst case, a complete brute force with no dictionary/rainbow table, so I think it's not a bad estimate.
Edit: spelling
Edit again: The comment I was referring to is gone, so I removed the refrence. The numbers are still correct though.
thanks for this, OP forgot to mention that it's MD5 and i think that's absolutely crucial
Yes, this is what it looks like using bcrypt, and the same AWS GPUs:
But they also mention that most low priority logins that people don't care about like forums, restaurants, etc. still use MD5, and password reuse becomes a huge problem here.
Ohh, thanks. I updated it.
Don’t most systems lock out accounts after a few failed attempts?
That's not how it typically works. Accounts are usually obtained from a hash file (like what's in your /etc/shadow or whatever the equivalent is in Windows).
In there your typical password looks like a strong string of gibberish characters, but is actually the result of a one way function that processed the original password. When you enter you password, the function is applied to it and the result is compared to the stored one.
To break a password, you have to run stuff through that function (which is slightly computationally expensive, although using GPUs now helps quite a bit) until you find whatever matches the stored string (because it''s a one way function). Then you have the original password. This is known as a dictionary attack (because you basically have to run through the whole dictionary).
And this concludes hacking 101 for today.
No, a dictionary attack uses a specific collection of known passwords (usually from leaks/compromised websites etc.) and regular words. Then you apply common substitutions, like a 3 for an e or appending an !. This collection is then called a dictionary.
What you described and is referred to in the infographic is called a brute force attack.
Still need to know what the salt is, assuming the website is somewhat competent about password storage.
neat, what I take from this and the discussion below is that with a pw containing upper- and lowercase letters, numbers as well as symbols that 12 is just long enough.
The objective for password cracking is to obtain the hash of the users password. Obviously, if the intruder can get the raw password, that's better for them and doesn't require cracking.
If there hash can be obtained, then the objective becomes to match it. Since most passwords are stored in a one-way hash, you basically take a known value, run it though the hash, and compare the result with the hash. If they match, then the known value is the password (or at least one that has a hash overlap with the correct password (which is good enough).
Brute forcing the password prompt generally doesn't work because of lockouts on password attempts at the page, and you're correct on that, so it's not a valid way to attack the system for the password.
