March 13, 2020

Passwords vs. passphrases

Slashdot - For more than a decade now, security experts have had discussions about what's the best way of choosing passwords for online accounts. There's one camp that argues for password complexity by adding numbers, uppercase letters, and special characters, and then there's the other camp, arguing for password length by making passwords longer. This week, in its weekly tech advice column known as Tech Tuesday, the FBI Portland office leaned on the side of longer passwords. "Instead of using a short, complex password that is hard to remember, consider using a longer passphrase," the FBI said. "This involves combining multiple words into a long string of at least 15 characters," it added. "The extra length of a passphrase makes it harder to crack while also making it easier for you to remember."

1 comment:

Anonymous said...

My opinion:
Seems like different sites have different rules for their passwords...
Some don't want special characters, and some require at least one special character.
Most all desire combination of letters and numbers, but are not specific in rules ie. say 'have one number' but actually allow more than one number.

The Long Phrase of various words suggested would not work when sites desire numbers and / or special characters.