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[–] 6 points 11 months ago* (last edited 11 months ago) (1 child)

Pass phrases for things that need to be human readable/rememberable.

Generated strings for everything else.

Because a pass phrase is inherently vulnerable to a dictionary attack because... it is words. You can obfuscate that but all the ways that would actually not compromise the readability are also pretty well known (whether that is "a=@" or "every 'e' is a 'b'" and so forth.

Is a 96 character pass phrase meaningfully more vulnerable than a 16 character generated string? That gets into the realm of hypotheticals and "one day we'll have quantum computers" but you are generally looking at a situation where everything is fucked anyway or there is a very targeted attack on you... at which point "hmm. 96 characters? Must be a pass phrase". So... not the venue to discuss.

But, at that point... if you are using a password manager/vault anyway...


Also the reality is that anyone who has ever dealt with a bank or some other "legacy" website rapidly learns that there are max lengths for passwords because they are more afraid of allocating a few extra megabytes for the SQL database than anything else. At which point your pass phrase goes out the window and you are back to "p@$$w0rd" level bullshit (or, better yet, you have a mental model/style of password).

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