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So that was a few seconds, which is indeed slower,
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2.91
but that really wasn't that much effort at all.
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So presumably, then, even four letters of the alphabet
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might not be enough to keep us secure.
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So let me go ahead and do what we all are told to do anyway,
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which is to go into your phone or whatever device in question
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and actually use four characters perhaps instead.
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So not just letters, not just digits, but let's toss in some punctuation
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as well.
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0.85
And in the world of punctuation, at least on a US English keyboard,
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there's typically as many as 94 possibilities for letters, numbers,
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and punctuation because we have 26 lowercase letters, 26
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uppercase letters, 10 decimal digits, 0 through 9,
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and another 32 punctuation symbols that we can add into the mix as well.
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So that gives me 94 possible keys that I can hit here,
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or 94 to the fourth power.
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And does anyone want to estimate what this is?
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We've gone from 10,000 to 7 million to I'm
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seeing it in the chat, roughly 78 million possibilities, so
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in some sense, 10 times more secure.
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Let's go back to my terminal window, open up my code here,
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and import not only ASCII letters, but also the digits from before, and also,
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this time, some punctuation as well.
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Now let's go ahead and change just the ASCII letters alone
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to ASCII letters plus those digits plus that punctuation.
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And just to save some time, I'm going to highlight and copy what I just typed,
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and I'm going to change the second position, the third position,
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and the fourth position, as well, to use that combination of 94 possibilities.
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I'm going to open up my terminal window again.
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I'm going to run Python of crack.py.
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And this time, because we have 10 times as many possibilities,
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I kind of had 10 times the amount of time to walk over to the screen
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because indeed we're still in the lowercase Es, Fs, Gs, Hs.
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And now it looks a bit like a Hollywood movie maybe.
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You can perhaps see, even though it's going across the screen fast,
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that there's a lot of cryptic output here
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because we're running through all of the letters, the digits,
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and the punctuation.
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So it looks a little fancy at that.
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Now, you might recall, too, from Hollywood movies,
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too, that they tend to be very dramatic.
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And so instead of just doing this, which is iterating from left to right very
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slowly, the movies and TV shows tend to very dramatically
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get, like, the third character right, then the first character right, then
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the fourth character right.
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And then just in time, you get the second one as well.
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That's not really ho brute force works.
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You tend to do things methodically, not jumping around from symbol to symbol.
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But this is clearly taking a long time.
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And I'm not even going to finish waiting for this to go because we still have
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to get through all the punctuation.
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So this is to say, ultimately, that 78 million possibilities is actually
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getting up there pretty fast.
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But honestly, if we come back in like a minute or so,
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I bet that will be finished nonetheless.
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And none of us hopefully has a password that's only four characters
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nowadays, letters, numbers, and punctuation.
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Odds are it's at least a conventional eight characters.
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And indeed most websites and apps require as much of you as well.
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Now, the math here is pretty straightforward too.
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If you have 94 possibilities, but you have eight characters in total now, now
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that's 94 to the eighth power.
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And does anyone want a ballpark just how many
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passwords are possible if it's only eight characters, which
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isn't even that long but you have eight of them total?
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Too many, comes back one answer.
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Too much to count.
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I see that we've given up here.
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But, oh, I did see one in the chat.
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It's roughly this many possible passwords,
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which is actually a little hard to figure out.
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So this is, let's see, millions, billions, trillions quadrillions.
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So this is 6 quadrillion possibilities.
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So now we're talking.
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Now the adversary is probably going to run out of time, run out of energy,
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run out of money, run out of lifetime if it's
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going to take this much time to try to crack,
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so to speak, your particular password.
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And so here's one of our first takeaways when it comes to cybersecurity
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and securing our accounts.
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It really is this game of relativity and resources.
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What we're really doing here is not something fundamentally
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different by adding in digits and letters and punctuation.
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It sort of still the same formula, the same approach to our passwords.
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But as we add complexity, and as we make it longer and longer,
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we're raising the bar to the adversary.
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Why?
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Well, so long as you and I don't do something dumb like still choose 0000
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0000 so long as we're choosing something that's pretty random in that range of 6
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quadrillion possibilities, it's going to take the adversary way more time than
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it would otherwise to brute force their way into that password.
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And so by the time they finally get into the account,
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you might have changed the password already,
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you might not be using the account anymore, or you or the adversary
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might not even be on this planet anymore.
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And that's indeed the goal.
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But there is a downside, of course.
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The longer your password gets, and the more complicated it gets,
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the more likely you and I are to not even be
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able to remember what that password is.
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