Quote from: MrTeal on June 18, 2012, 05:08:49 PM

Quote from: cmg5461 on June 18, 2012, 04:36:27 PM

Quote from: BinaryMage on June 17, 2012, 03:42:54 AM

Now, for some math. In the 95 character ASCII printable keyspace (usually around the number of different characters allowed in a password), checking every possible password up to 8 characters would take around 6.6 e+15 tries. While that seems like a lot, a 1 TH/s (1 e+12 hashes/sec) unit could process all of those in under two hours. (this is hypothetical, I'm not accounting for bandwidth limitations and the like)

Sorry, that was a bit long winded. Hopefully it's at least moderately understandable.

Now the scary thing, watch the curve as you go to 9, 10 and 11+ characters.

passwords should be 9+ characters, as that would take years for the average person to crack it with average equipment.

edit-

this is what I was referring to

No offense, but that's a completely useless (and actually deceptive) graph. The scale on the y axis is really poorly chosen.

The difference between each line is 2.5E19...

1,000,000,000,000,000,000,000
750,000,000,000,000,000,000
500,000,000,000,000,000,000
250,000,000,000,000,000,000
0

That look better?

The graph is 100^x, in case you're wondering