And here I am avoiding even special characters because I worry about having to enter them on a French keyboard at some point.
Do be aware that a single emoji is often composed of multiple Unicode characters (e.g. base emoji + gender modifier + skin tone modifier). Entering that on the command line is going to be fun.
And here I am avoiding even special characters because I worry about having to enter them on a French keyboard at some point.
I use only special characters that are on the same places with most layouts (at least english and finnish). I suppose passwords with ä or ö might be a bit more resistant to brute-force attacks, but it causes far more problems than it might theoretically solve.
i couldn't login using AZERTY. i thought i fucked up and forgotten my password but no, same letter was encoded as a different character in 2 different languages 🤷
Why not? Pretty much all software from the past twenty years has been UTF-8 compatible. The issue is more that you may at some point be in a situation where you can't (directly) use your password manager.
NordPass is completely incorrect on the "it makes a password easier to "crack" thing.
I absolutely don't recommend using emojis in your password, as it is far too easy to get locked out. However, a password containing an emoji is significantly harder to crack.
Hashing is a process used to calculate a large number based on some input data. If the input is the same, the output is the same. If the input differs just slightly, the output is completely different. This process is mathematically irreversible. Since this (and other techniques) is often used for passwords, to "crack"/bruteforce a password, the attacker has to go through every possible combination of input data, calculate the hash, and check if the hash is the same as the password hash.
To make the process of bruteforcing a hash quicker, an attacker often makes assumptions about the input data. If they know a password contains 8 characters, and only lowercase letters, this massively narrows down the amount of passwords that need to be hashed and checked. If they know the password contains someones birth year, that too reduces the time to bruteforce a password.
The more possible characters you have per position in your password, the longer it will take to bruteforce. An 8 character password with just lowercase letters has 208.827.064.576 possible combinations. This sounds like a lot, but it's often bruteforced rather quickly. Adding uppercase letters and numbers to that, we're already at 218.340.105.584.896 possible combinations. That's ~1000x more combinations, and that's for 8 characters. It's the difference between bruteforcing taking a day, and taking 1000 days. (Do note an 8 characters lowercase password probably only takes like a few seconds to minutes, not a full day.)
According to https://emojipedia.org/stats there are 3664 different emojis. Lets say we create an 8 emoji password. (some emojis aren't one character internally, the same principle still applies.) Just 8 completely randomly chosen emojis. That password would have 32.482.071.647.592.311.234.920.185.856 different possible combinations. That is about 148.768.232.755.857 times more combinations than an 8 character uppercase+lowercase+numbers password. That is the difference between bruteforcing taking a day or taking 407584199331 years.
The same things as non-emoji passwords still apply, you can make assumptions about which emojis are used. People aren't entirely random, so chances are higher they used some of the more common emojis. However, that is similar to prioritizing the letter "e" because it is more common. Yes, it'll probably reduce the time taken to bruteforce a bunch of passwords, but it's not set in stone that every password will even contain the letter "e".
Again, due to the potential of breaking things, locking yourself out, etc. I DO NOT recommend using emojis. Use a password manager with longer passwords.
However, including an emoji in your password makes it significantly more difficult to bruteforce. As the assumption that the characters in your password are letters, numbers, and symbols no longer holds, which drastically increases the possible number of combinations.
According to minerstat.com, an NVidia RTX 4090 has a hashrate of 118.07MH/s. This is 118.07 Megahashes per second, or 118.070.000 hashes per second. For a password with only 8 lowercase letters (208.827.064.576 combinations), it would take an RTX 4090 approximately 1769 seconds (or ~30 minutes) to go through all possible combinations. For an 8 character upper+lower+numbers password (218340105584896 combinations) it would take 1849243 seconds, or 21.4 days.
For an 8 emoji password (32482071647592311234920185856 combinations), it would take 275.108.593.610.504.896.512 seconds, or 8.723.636.276.335 years.
Lets say a magic prediction algorithm reduces the number of possible combinations in each password to 1 out of every 1 million previously possible combinations. 8 lowercase letters would be cracked instantly, while an 8 emoji password would still take 8.723.636 years.
We are sorry, your request could not be processed. 😊
As you know, at Corp.inc we believe that the most important thing there is, is human connection. ❤️ For this reason, every complaint must contain at least 2 happy emojis or 1 heart.
I would recommend generating your passwords and storing them in a local password manager like KeePassXC. This way, you only need to remember one password from the database itself and you will not worry if any website leaks its database since all your passwords are unique.
Hah! Lots of (shitty) sites don't allow some "special" characters, like '. That's usually a sign that they're storing passwords insecurely, and it's always a sign that they're not following current security best practices (composition rules reduce security).
If you make it a policy for your corp. You will screw anyone with visual impairment.
We are totally unable to see the detail in these shitty little pics. So would be unable to use them as a password.
Fine if uou want to use them. And software should start supporting it. But please dont push corps to screw over disabled. Its hard enough dealing with them already. Nearly every big company forgets vision or hearing impairment when trying to manage customers and staff.
I don't think anyone takes this seriously. It's just fun to come up with the worst password policies.
Just imagine the error:
"Sorry, your password could not be set. If you decide to include more than one animal, make sure they get along or include a zookeeper as well."
Just imagine the error: “Sorry, your password could not be set. If you decide to include more than one animal, make sure they get along or include a zookeeper as well.”
I'm sure one could extend this to include that. Also ferrying a wolf, a goat and a cabbage from the left side to the right side of the password in the correct order.
Afaik, emoticons...er....sorry, emojis are (mostly) dictionary words. And using most (if not all) as passwords is a one-way ticket to "wtf happened to my work PC and why my boss wants to kill me"-land.
Edit: I thought this was an obvious enough joke towards your obvious enough joke -- just "outjoking" your joke. :^)
Emojis are interpreted and stored as Unicode codes like U+1F6D2. Sometimes you might be able to do something like :bed: but those are more for human convenience and up to the individual application to handle or not, when it gets stored it'll be converted to its corresponding Unicode
A series of emojis, once made into their Unicode would actually serve as a fairly decent password, if it's of sufficient length.
The irony is if it was actually stored as dictionary words it would actually end up being a very secure password, see