"Hammered asinine requirements": Now there’s a secure password -
— 24 January, 2013 18:08 Youre best off forgetting your grammar
lessons when it comes to creating passphrases, according to new
research out of Carnegie Mellon University and MIT. The
researchers say that using grammar good or bad can clue in
hackers about the words in a multi-word password. And theyve
built an algorithm as a proof-of-concept to show it (The team,
led by software engineering Ph.D. student Ashwini Rao of CMUs
Institute for Software Research, will present its research at
the Association for Computing Machinerys Conference on Data and
Application Security and Privacy on Feb. 20 in San Antonio.).
The team tested its grammar-aware password cracking algorithm
against 1,434 passwords containing 16 or more characters, and
cracked 10% of the dataset via the algorithm. We should not
blindly rely on the number of words or characters in a password
as a measure of its security, Rao said, in a statement. The
researchers say that while a passw