So what happens when we take some time off for vacation? You don’t get any blog posts. That should be pretty obvious by now, but we’re back to work for the near term.
The Georgia Institute of Technology just published a report that indicates we should all be considering 12-character passwords for the future. CNN commented on the report, which cracked 8-character passwords with ease using a PC graphics processing unit (GPU) that costs just a few hundred dollars. If you have ever purchased a computer with multi-core graphics processors from Nvidia or AMD’s ATI division, then you have the horsepower to brute-force passwords in a relatively short period of time.
Why are 12-characters recommended? It’s all about the mathematics. Clusters of graphics cards can crack an 8-character password in less than two hours, but using the same processing power would take 17,134 years to crack a 12-character one.
We’ve been using 10 and 12-character passwords for some time. It looks like it will be 12 from now on.
- John and Mike
(703) 359-0700
digitalsamurai@senseient.com
www.senseient.com
