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by Grimburger 1619 days ago
> there's nothing that can magically protect you if you choose a low-entropy password

Ignoring the extra time for decryption there's no difference between a unique low-entropy password that takes 2 years to bruteforce and a high-entropy password that takes 2 years to bruteforce.

1 comments

Yeah, if you a very common password like "hunter2" or "Password1", then even with a KDF that takes 100ms to generate the key, it's still very feasible to run through the 100k most common passwords and compromise it within a few hours.

If we're talking a more random but still short password (for example, just 8 random alphanumeric characters is log2(262+10)8 = ~48 bits), then the KDF becomes very attractive to help skyrocket the brute forcing cost to something more similar to trying to brute force the 256 bit key instead.