Digit being the key here- alphanumeric with mixed case and symbols takes a dozen cards over 160 years.
To be fair, that assumes complete exhaustion of the password space. If you assume that a given password is totally random, then it’d take half that time, 80 years, on average.
Thing is, most people don’t choose totally random passwords, and there are utilities that will try to generate statistically-more-common passwords sooner in that sequence, well before 80 years.
I’m probably very out-of-date here, but as an example, one elderly utility, John the Ripper, comes with “mangling rules” to append a “1” at the end of a given sequence fairly early, because that’s how a lot of people make their password pass a digits requirement. Using passwords containing dictionary words and replacing “e” with “3”, stuff like that.
I’d guess that today, someone probably has software that has rules to order its attempts that are trained off leaked password databases to be statistically optimal to defeat them, rather than merely manually crafted with human guesswork.
Totally fair points! Password managers FTW, all my passwords are 25 character complete random.
I was told there is no such thing as complete random
https://www.idquantique.com/random-number-generation/products/quantis-qrng-pcie/
Edit: the actual way they do it is from things like sensor noise, it’s practically impossible to predict the random noise on a temperature sensor for example
Edit2: oh wait it’s literally just an led and cmos sensor lol (well i guess there’s a lot of processing etc but still)
Yeah, I tried cracking my own pass_phrase_ once… it was doing well until it got to (I think) digit #9 and showed it would take another year…
Specifically, a bcrypt hash with the cost set to 10, i.e. 32,768 iterations of hashing. If you are choosing an algorithm, consider Argon2id.
