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mean something analogously, whereby you're using software to digitally try
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all possible passwords.
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And so here, too, are you vulnerable because if your password is too short,
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even if it's random with letters, numbers, and symbols,
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odds are an adversary or a hacker that has enough time
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and enough technical savvy, they can just try
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every possible password in the world.
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And eventually, they might very well get into your system.
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So how do we go about defending against these kinds of attacks?
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Well, we use these passwords, but these passwords of course
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come in different forms.
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And it's kind of a low bar that is set by default on a lot of devices
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still nowadays.
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For instance, on your phone if you'd like
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to chime in here in the chat, how many characters or digits, in particular,
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are typically required of systems?
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Well, I would conjecture that very often when I set up a phone,
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I'm only asked for a passcode, a numeric password, of four digits alone.
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Now, if you have a four-digit passcode or password more generally, how secure
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is that?
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And how do we even go about thinking about how secure that password is?
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Well, I would propose that we could start to measure not even using
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fancy math, but just some basic heuristics, we could measure
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the security of a password that has just four digits by considering well,
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how many possible four-digit passcodes are there?
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So perhaps if you'd like to chime in here in the chat,
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how many possible passwords are there if they're
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all digits 0 through 9, decimal digits, and if you only have four of them?
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How many possibilities are there?
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I'm seeing 1,000.
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I'm seeing 10,000.
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I'm seeing 9,999.
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And I'm seeing a whole range.
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And I think a lot of you have the answer is spot on.
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It's 10,000.
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It's 10,000.
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Why?
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Well if we just think about this numerically,
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if I've got four decimal digits, 0 through 9, well,
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the smallest password I could come up with, so to speak, would be 0000.
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And the largest password I could come up with would be 99999.
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Now, you might think OK, well, that's, obviously 9,999 possibilities.
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But not quite because if you include 0000, that's the 10,000th possibility.
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So indeed there's 10,000 possible passwords
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if we're using four digits specifically.
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So how do we actually think about that more generally,
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especially so that we can now figure out the math for larger passwords as well?
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Well, if you've got 0 through 9 as the first possible digit,
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and 0 through 9 as the next, and 0 through 9
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is the third, and 0 through 9 as the fourth,
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you have 10 possibilities times 10 possibilities times 10 times 10.
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This, of course, if we do it out more mathematically
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is 10 to the fourth power, the exponent being 4.
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And that, of course, gives us 10,000 as well.
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So that might be the more mathematical way of approaching it,
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versus just the more intuitive, that 0000 can go all the way up to 9999.
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Now, again, a question for the group, how long
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do you think it might take for an adversary or a hacker
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to get into my device, for instance, my phone, if I do
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have a four-digit password?
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If I've got a four-digit password, this means there might have to try as many
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as 10,000 possibilities because in the easiest case, sure, they get lucky,
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and my password is still the default 0000.
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But in the worst case, I chose 9999, and they don't get to that
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until the very end of their attempts.
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Or maybe I choose something there in between.
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I'm seeing 10 seconds, less than a second, milliseconds, 10 seconds a day,
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4 hours.
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So the responses are all over the place.
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So how can we go about actually measuring this or estimating this?
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Well, let me propose this.
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I'm going to go over to my computer here.
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And even if you've never written any code before,
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let's go ahead and write some code together here.
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I'm going to go ahead and open a program called VS Code, Visual Studio
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Code, which is a free program that we use in CS50 more generally
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that allows me to write code on my Mac or PC or really
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any internet-based device.
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And I can actually write code, and not only write it, but run it.
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And I'm going to write code, in this case, in a language called Python.
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And this is just a very popular language,
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but I could use any of a dozen or more different programming languages.
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And the goal here is not to learn Python--
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for that, we have whole other classes--
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but to just demonstrate what an adversary, what a hacker
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need to do if they want to get into, for instance, your iPhone or Android device
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or anything that has just a four-digit password.
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Now, my presumption here for demonstration sake
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is that I'm going to go ahead and write code that just prints
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all possible passwords on the screen.
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But you could imagine if I had a USB cable or maybe a lightning cable,
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I could connect this phone to this laptop,
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especially if it's your phone that I just swiped from a table,
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could quickly plug it into my computer here,
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run the code that I'm about to write, and maybe automatically send
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all 10,000 possibilities to your device before you even
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realize the phone is gone.
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Now, here's how I'm going to do this.
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I'm going to go ahead, and in a text file called crack.py,
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where crack is actually a term of art.
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