Quote from: ius on July 01, 2011, 02:26:58 AM

- If you maintain proper password policies, you shouldn't have to worry about disclosing a password which you're not using anymore (you weren't reusing it anywhere, were you?)
- If it was actually 'random' and 'long' enough you should be able to determine the average time required to crack it - ie. the feasibility of a brute force attack (dictionary should be useless) given am average set of cracking hardware (GPUs).

All that, without having to resort to calling me retarded. Wink

Wrong ius.
Even if the password is cryptographically strong, it doesn't mean that it can't actually allow you to predict his future passwords by the style of it.
For example, I have a specific method to remember passwords without storing it anywhere.

I know that my passwords would never be cracked within a millenium since it is base96+1 (alphanumeric+upper/lower case+symbols+foreign language characters) even in a Class F which is the highest level of cracking possible (1,000,000,000 Passwords/sec) normally possible with supercomputers and distributed cracking.

I know that my passwords are not in dictionaries.
But I am not a computer so I can't memorize random characters, therefore I use some heuristics and mnemonics to remember them.

If you saw my password, you could deduce from my style the rules I set for myself for all the passwords I am using on every single site and the future ones I'll generate.
You might not guess it right away, but you could tailor an attack for me, launching a statistical attack, or just making a password generating algorithm based on what type of rules I set up in my mind for new passwords.
It would considerably narrow down the possible passwords and accelerating considerably the cracking speed with a extremely higher degree of success.

Yes, it is security through obscurity, but this obscurity is in my brain, and as long as you don't have a mind reader the password will remain cryptographically secure.
(for the record, my password wasn't cracked, and I am also cracking it myself to test it out. I got more than 2000+ passwords cracked mine is still holding up pretty well and it should remain that way)

Therefore I totally agree with mewantsbitcoins, telling your password is stupid.
It can be really secure and be impossible to crack with current means, but knowing his mindset it might reveal everything.