Password Strength and Security

Created by Ankit Suryawanshi, Modified on Wed, 13 Sep 2023 at 10:23 PM by Ankit Suryawanshi

These days on the Internet all of your important information could be just a website request away. This is why it’s important as ever to ensure that you’re using a secure password to restrict access to your private information.

You should keep your Hivium Customer Portal, cPanel, and Email passwords secure, as well as any CMS such as WordPress. Anything that’s publicly accessible on the Internet should be using a strong password for your security.

How are Passwords Cracked/Guessed by Hackers/Computers?
Password Strength
Creating Stronger Passwords with Higher Strength

It’s typically better to come up with a secure password that you can actually remember, otherwise you’ll probably rely on writing it down or storing it on your computer which could potentially be hacked.

How are Passwords Cracked/Guessed by Hackers/Computers?

Most accounts that have their passwords compromised are not done so by another human being directly.

Instead a computer will be tasked with guessing your password, so planning should go in to understanding and then deterring a computer from cracking your password.

A hacker has a variety of malicious tactics available to them when trying to crack your password. These would be the two most common attacks you see on the Internet today:

Attack Type	How its Done?	Prevention Technique
Brute Force Attack	The attacker runs a script that tries again and again to randomly crack your password by sheer brute force.	A long password with multiple character sets is the best protection. The higher your password entropy the less likely your password will be compromised by a brute force attack.
Dictionary Attack	The attacker utilizes dictionaries of known words or passwords and a script to try them in thousands of combinations until one matches up with the correct password.	Don’t use common words, or keystrokes such as qwerty or 123456. Using a combination of multiple character sets helps reduce the likelihood of your password matching in the dictionary.

Password Strength

In the world of computing and passwords, there is something commonly referred to as password strength.

In layman’s terms this basically means the higher your password strength the less predictable your password patterns are for a computer, so the stronger and more secure your password is theoretically.

This is a simple equation to demonstrate password strength:

H total binary bits of strength | L length of your password | N number of possible symbols in password

H = L * log₂(N)

Depending on how the password was generated, either by a random sequence or a human, this equation can get a lot more complex.

Creating Stronger Passwords with Higher Strength

Knowing how strength is calculated, we can see that doing certain things to our password adds more than others.

The length of your password can add a lot of strength to your password, but adding complexity by using more than one character set can also greatly increase it.

This is why typically most sites require you to use at least one uppercase, one lowercase, one digit, and one special symbol character in your password.

Your typical online account password can be made up of a possible94 characters,in each character slot.