Hacker News new | ask | show | jobs
by plopz 3042 days ago
Even if the attacker got them out of order, it would let them be able to brute force guess in a small number of attempts.
1 comments

For example, there are about 41,000 possible passwords for a given set of 8 characters, out of around 96^8 possible 8 character passwords (in the ASCII character set).
And if any of those are words or almost words, you'd guess that first and probably have it.
Where does 41000 come from?
It's 8! (8 factorial) which is 40320.

This is 127,286,426,869 (~128bn) times smaller than 92^8.

Edit: Note that if you have a repeated character in your 8 charcter password then the number of permutations of the set of 8 (7 distinct) characters is further halved to 20,160.

And just by doubling the amount of selectors you could always check for a repeated character! (AKA [value$=aa], [value$=bb], etc...)