Great password

[CigarNut]

Originally Posted by markem

You 'crack' them by encoding them (MD5 or SHA-1 these days) and comparing the resulting ciphertext with the stored one. This is the same way that the logon process verifies that you entered the correct password.

My guess is that he did not crack this one...

[RUNYYFan]

Originally Posted by AdamJoshua

I'm sorry but I just love this thread and the turn it took.

So true. Great job markem!

[8zeros]

It's just a joke.
Hey Mark, that formula doesn't seem to take into account that after each guess the pool of guesses gets smaller, thereby increasing your chance of a lucky guess each time. Not that it would matter on a 52 character password.

[markem]

Originally Posted by 8zeros

It's just a joke.
Hey Mark, that formula doesn't seem to take into account that after each guess the pool of guesses gets smaller, thereby increasing your chance of a lucky guess each time. Not that it would matter on a 52 character password.

The algorithm is for the average time over a random collection of passwords. As stated before, it isn't a floor since 1 is the true minimum. It is also possible that it will take substantially more than the average since, well, it's an average and for it to be an average there has to be at least one data point above the average.

The value of (50**52) is the list of all passwords within that space (technically one could argue that it is 50**53 but that's not as important in this case). This value represents the 'closure' or fully enumerated list of possible combinations within the space from 1 character up to 50 character passwords including all possible combinations. Once again, the crypto math is a little bit more than this, but this approximation is close enough for hand grenades and atom bombs.