Worm/Passwords
Doug Gwyn
gwyn at smoke.BRL.MIL
Mon Nov 28 21:52:28 AEST 1988
In article <220 at twwells.uucp> bill at twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes:
> ... lassword ...
Oh, but I can't let you have the lassword!
>As you can see, many of these would make easily pronounceable passwords.
>
>Using a better database might create more or better passwords. And
>each user could have his own database; this makes knowledge of the
>travesty algorithm useless for guessing someone's password.
I didn't mean to imply that this approach wasn't viable, but I
couldn't resist the experiment and thought (since the posted travesty
program wasn't runnable on anything except MS-DOS) that an illustration
of what "travesty" produces might be informative to many readers.
Indeed, use of samples of a natural language itself as a database
for producing statistically similar "random" text is a good idea.
I seem to recall one of the Computer Recreations columns in
Scientific American a couple of years ago exploring this method.
Certainly a larger, more varied database would have produce a better
selection of lasswords.
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