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by ApolloFortyNine 36 days ago
Explaining your life to an llm, then having it generate permutations of passwords to try does sound like it would work a decent percentage of the time.

A large percentage of passwords aren't a random string of characters but a memorable word + memorable number. There's existing projects that basically do the same, and 3.5 trillion doesn't really make it clear if one of those wouldn't have worked as well, but I can see it having an above random chance to guess a password.

3 comments

>Explaining your life to an llm, then having it generate permutations of passwords to try does sound like it would work a decent percentage of the time.

I cannot relate to this at all. This information doesn't really seem that helpful. What might the strategy look like? Including spouses names or other proper nouns associated with you. But it's going to be a massive brute force effort still, and the likelyhood of a targeted crack that performs significantly better than more naive brute force passwords seems so unlikely.

Are your passwords like "SPOUSE_NAME:HOMETOWN_NAME"? Even if so there are probably more people with dictionary words that can be brute forced faster. IT would have to be the case that more people use patterns like that compared to something a regular dictionary attack could crack.

The amount of times I've gotten told a password and it contains birth year or anniversary year, maybe child birth year, is insane. I'd say 9 times out of 10 it's that or a dictionary word.
The idea that someone (the NSA?) is training models on all of our collected info, and using that to predict all of our hidden information, is horrifying.

The best time to start using a password manager was 10 years ago. The second best time is now.

If any authority wants your data, a password isn't whats stopping them.
So the remotely running AI now can guess many of your past and possibly future passwords when somone else promps it to ? Seems handy!