Date: Wed, 23 Jul 2003 20:47:53 +1000
To: "David S. Miller" <davem@redhat.com>
Cc: a.marsman@aYniK.com, alan@lxorguk.ukuu.org.uk,
       linux-kernel@vger.kernel.org
Subject: Re: 2.4.22-pre7: are security issues solved?
Message-ID: <20030723104753.GA2479@gondor.apana.org.au>
References: <Pine.LNX.4.44.0307212234390.3580-100000@localhost.localdomain> <E19fGMZ-0000Zm-00@gondolin.me.apana.org.au> <20030723033505.145db6b8.davem@redhat.com>
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From: Herbert Xu <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
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On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 03:35:05AM -0700, David S. Miller wrote:
> 
> If I know your password is 7 characters I have a smaller
> space of passwords to search to just brute-force it.

It's much smaller if you didn't know that it was at most 7 characters
long.  However, if you did know the upper bound, or you were just
brute forcing all passwords starting from 1 character, then the
difference is relatively minor.  This is because

n + n^2 + n^3 + n^4 + n^5 + n^6

is much smaller than n^7 where n is something like 62 for a reasonable
password.

So if your password was broken using this method, then it's probably
too short anyway.
-- 
Debian GNU/Linux 3.0 is out! ( http://www.debian.org/ )
Email:  Herbert Xu ~{PmV>HI~} <herbert@gondor.apana.org.au>
Home Page: http://gondor.apana.org.au/~herbert/
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