mattbuck
Eeyore
Reged: 02/13/04
Posts: 3285
Loc: Nottingham, UK
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*** PASSWORD SECURITY ***
#161454 - 05/25/11 07:46 AM (128.243.253.115)
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Your Neveron passwords are not invisible to admins.
This will hopefully be fixed in due course. The situation has been like this for the 10 years Nev has run.
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Haha, you people think admins still look at these forums.
Visit the Platonian! Updated! Stuff! Things! Click!
Edited by mattbuck (05/25/11 07:59 AM)
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mattbuck
Eeyore
Reged: 02/13/04
Posts: 3285
Loc: Nottingham, UK
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Re: *** PASSWORD SECURITY ***
[Re: mattbuck]
#161455 - 05/25/11 08:24 AM (128.243.253.115)
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And now, how to write a good password:
Password security relies on several things:
1) You need to be able to remember it
2) It needs to be fairly long - every extra character makes it roughly 2 orders of magnitude more difficult to crack by brute force.
3) It should contain a mixture of upper case, lower case, numbers and symbols.
4) It should not be a dictionary word, or even a combination of several. In particular, please don't use "password" as your password.
5) The following symbols cannot be used in a Neveron password: ; ' " % # > < & +
6) It should not be something that can be guessed by anyone else.
That being said, non-dictionary words can be more tricky to remember, so you might want to start with something that is sort of like a real word, but won't be found in any dictionary. For instance, let's start with "neveronian". That's a ten letter word, so not too bad length-wise, but it's all lower case, not so good.
At 10 letters all lower case there are around 1.4*10^14 different passwords. If we start including capital letters, say, "neVeRonian", that ups it to about 1.4*10^17 - so it makes it 1000 times harder to crack your password.
Now let's add some numbers - it's simple to replace "i"s with 1s, etc, so still at 10 letters "neVeRon1an" you're up to 8.4*10^17 different combinations possible, so making it 6* as difficult.
Now, a special character or two. We're somewhat limited on Neveron in that we can't use any of ;'"%#><&+ - but this still leaves !£$€^*()-_=`¦¬\|/?,.[]{}:@~ and those are just the special characters you can get on a standard British keyboard using shift or alt+gr.
If you use Character Map (run > charmap) you can get a vast array of symbols, most with an alt+0123 code. For instance ø is alt+0248. We modify our password once more "n£VeRøn1an". Using the extended character listing makes it about 10 times as hard PER CHARACTER to crack your password, so in a ten letter password you're looking at making it 10 BILLION times harder, so we'd be up to around 8.4*10^27 combinations, at a conservative estimate.
To put that into perspective, the universe is about 4.4*10^17 seconds old, and contains about 10^23 stars.
Also remember to change your password every so often, and don't use the same password in several places. Or at least not places you care about.
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Haha, you people think admins still look at these forums.
Visit the Platonian! Updated! Stuff! Things! Click!
Edited by ShadowMasterCM (05/25/11 10:02 AM)
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