On The Insecurity Of Passwordspassphrases These Days

In a posting to the cryptography mailing list. Interesting statistics in the presentation. Update your threat models!

Folks might want to look at https://www.huitema.net/talks/ietf63-security.ppt the slides from a talk Christian Huitema gave at the Applications Area at IETF63 this past week. Of particular interest is just how cheap it is to brute-force a passphrase these days, especially if it’s just used as a cryptographic key with known plaintext (i.e., in challenge/ response protocols).

--Steven M. Bellovin, https://www.cs.columbia.edu/~smb