Path: csiph.com!fu-berlin.de!uni-berlin.de!individual.net!not-for-mail From: Jeffrey Goldberg Newsgroups: sci.crypt Subject: Re: Firefox improvements. Date: Fri, 16 Oct 2015 11:59:43 -0500 Lines: 33 Message-ID: References: <263cd$561a967a$d47876e2$46985@news.ziggo.nl> <92gl1b9ms3670hoofk13bbnuecbveqivt3@4ax.com> Reply-To: jeffrey+news@goldmark.org Mime-Version: 1.0 Content-Type: text/plain; charset=iso-8859-1; format=flowed Content-Transfer-Encoding: 8bit X-Trace: individual.net KTAdwkpFtmqROW5PTHr/5wI3inRg+7/fxTs6ePZdNnWC+WbFoM Cancel-Lock: sha1:Oj6mFVexY77eqfjZShlaV+LEA4A= User-Agent: Unison/2.1.10 Xref: csiph.com sci.crypt:32998 I'm sorry that I wasn't clear in who I was talking about. On 2015-10-16 08:01:18 +0000, Richard Heathfield said: > What you were observing from /my/ contributions to this thread was a > specific rebuttal of one particular claim - i.e. that adding password > restrictions (reducing the size of the keyspace) makes brute force > attacks more difficult. Right. You are correcting someone who is simply wrong about the math. Of course you are right. And as that goes without saying, I guess I haven't been saying it loud enough. I was trying to bring the discussion beyond that simple mathematical fact. > Whatever one's definition of brute force (whether or not it can take > advantage of some knowledge of the key), such restrictions cannot > possibly make that search /more/ difficult. > > I don't think there's anything even remotely cargo-cultish about such a > rebuttal. You are right. I was speculating that the cargo cult of password restrictions is what has put us in a position where we need to rebut things that are clearly wrong. Cheers, -j