Unfortunately, this is not such a great idea. The average person has a vocabulary of between 2000 and 5000 words (i'm not totally sure about those numbers, but i'm on the same order of magnitude). So assuming you can use up to 5000 words and make things easy to remember (which is the whole point), that gives you a search space of 25,000,000. That would be crackable minutes. Add on two random digits increases the search space by a factor of 100. That gives you 2,500,000,000 passwords to check, which is checkable in an hour or two at the most.

Bottom line is, dictionary words never make secure passwords. English text only has about 1.5 bits of entropy per letter. At work, we strongly discourage our users from using dictionary words from any language

-Mark
mlogan@ccs.neu.edu

In reply to RE: RE: Ethics of Passwords by young perlhopper
in thread Ethics of Passwords by Nitsuj

Title:
Use:  <p> text here (a paragraph) </p>
and:  <code> code here </code>
to format your post, it's "PerlMonks-approved HTML":


  • Posts are HTML formatted. Put <p> </p> tags around your paragraphs. Put <code> </code> tags around your code and data!
  • Titles consisting of a single word are discouraged, and in most cases are disallowed outright.
  • Read Where should I post X? if you're not absolutely sure you're posting in the right place.
  • Please read these before you post! —
  • Posts may use any of the Perl Monks Approved HTML tags:
    a, abbr, b, big, blockquote, br, caption, center, col, colgroup, dd, del, details, div, dl, dt, em, font, h1, h2, h3, h4, h5, h6, hr, i, ins, li, ol, p, pre, readmore, small, span, spoiler, strike, strong, sub, summary, sup, table, tbody, td, tfoot, th, thead, tr, tt, u, ul, wbr
  • You may need to use entities for some characters, as follows. (Exception: Within code tags, you can put the characters literally.)
            For:     Use:
    & &amp;
    < &lt;
    > &gt;
    [ &#91;
    ] &#93;
  • Link using PerlMonks shortcuts! What shortcuts can I use for linking?
  • See Writeup Formatting Tips and other pages linked from there for more info.