How to create a password that makes even the strongest supercomputer 'fail'

By rolling dice, users can create passwords that would take a supercomputer nearly 3,000 years to crack.

Choosing passwords for personal accounts such as Email, bank accounts, social networks. is similar to choosing a lock to store your treasure.

If that lock is old or too simple, you could lose your property to hackers.

With personal accounts such as Gmail, Facebook, Instagram, etc., the best advice is to use strong passwords to protect your account from being logged in and used illegally by others. permission.

Principle of password cracking

In 2022, cybersecurity researchers from Cybernews and password management company NordPass published a report on the most commonly used passwords on the Internet.

Speaking to Gizmodo, Cybernews said that the top common passwords are often easy-to-remember character strings such as '123456', 'root', "admin" .

It only takes hackers less than 1 second to crack common passwords of common users. (Photo: NordPass).

Many users also use famous people's names as passwords such as 'messi', 'ronaldo' or 'gaga', 'eminem'.

NordPass says most passwords are just a single word, so they are easy to crack. Just need a little knowledge about common passwords, no need for complicated hacking tricks, bad actors can detect these simple passwords.

Even the names of famous companies are used as key codes, increasing the risk of unauthorized intrusion.

Currently, most passwords are protected by hashing so that no one can trace the original character.

However, unlike encryption, hashing will still produce the same results for the same content. Specifically, if a hash function is used for the keyword 'ant', all algorithms will display a similar string.

With today's hardware power, hackers can crack short passwords consisting of only letters and numbers in just a few seconds using the brute-force method. (Photo: StrongDM).

This vulnerability will help cybercriminals easily detect some repeated hash functions, used for common passwords.

From there, hackers will proceed to crack the password using the brute-force method . This is a type of cyber attack that forces hackers to continuously rotate different characters to combine and create a correct password, said Mantas Sasnauskas, head of Cybernews' research team.

With today's hardware power, most modern computers can crack short passwords consisting of only letters and numbers in seconds.

Super passwords make even the fastest computers "fail"

A strong password is not only a little-known word, but also must contain many characters and punctuation, increasing the difficulty for hackers.

The more complex the password, the more jumbled characters it will contain and the more different content it will contain. Messed up characters will make the data noisy and difficult to crack using the brute-force method.

From this principle, 11-year-old Mira Modi from New York City came up with a service that provides randomly generated passwords through rolling dice.

By using dice, users can create a very strong password that is almost impossible for hackers to crack. (Photo: EFF).

Diceware is a method of deriving passwords by using dice to select random words from a special list called the Diceware Word List .

Specifically, after writing down the numbers by rolling the dice, each number will correspond to a word in the Diceware List to create a random phrase that is still relatively easy to remember.

Modi's mother - Julia Angwin - is an investigative journalist who won a Pulitzer Prize for journalism at ProPublica. She is also the author of a book on cyber security and freedom. It was she who inspired Modi to implement the idea of ​​creating passwords using Diceware.

With all the phrases being random from rolling dice , most technology experts believe that it will be difficult for individual hackers to crack the password with just one computer.

The key to this approach is that users should not modify phrases after they have been selected. Passwords generated from rolling dice rely entirely on randomness, making algorithmic analysis impossible.

Popular PCs today can try about 15 million passwords per second. Meanwhile, according to EEF, the world's fastest supercomputer can try about 92,000 billion passwords every second.

It would take the most powerful supercomputer nearly 3,000 years to crack a password created with five dice rolls. (Photo: Wired).

Even if a hacker had a list of phrases that users used to create passwords, a computer with the ability to try 15 million passwords per second would take more than 2,000 years to try. every possible combination.

The world's fastest supercomputer can crack that same password in an average of 1.5 hours.

However, if the user just rolls the dice two more times to increase the password length, the cracking time will increase to nearly 3,000 years for even the fastest supercomputer.