Protections against Password Cracking Attacks
Depending on how you approached this book, you may have various goals for this chapter. If you are a tester, or someone auditing the strength of passwords in your environment, then you may be concerned about what guidance to provide to the targets of your cracking operations to attempt to make their passwords more resistant to such attacks in the future. If you are trying to recover the password to your long-forgotten Bitcoin wallet, you may be thankful that you did not choose a more robust password at the time!
However, in many scenarios, the task of guiding our users will fall to us. The topic of how to build a strong password is not an easy one and the recommendations have changed much over the years. Additionally, our guidance may vary slightly depending on factors such as the robustness of our hashing algorithm and how slow cracking may work against such a construct.
In this chapter, we are going to cover the following topics...
