[arch-general] How long do you make the passphrase for the private key?

[Ralf Mardorf]

On Wed, 2019-06-26 at 10:41 +1000, asymptosis via arch-general wrote:
> https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/List_of_the_most_common_passwords

That's interesting. The most common passwords even don't contain simple
patterns as reversed words, such as "drowssap". It's funny that
"aleatoric" is a very important element of art and it already was before
computers existed. A culture of using patterns to avoid patterns already
exists on an intuitive basis used by artists all over the planet. Btw. a
musical phrase for example is made of notes, their level, their length
their relation to each other. Hand made music by gifted musicians has
noting to do with quantised sequencer patterns and rules such as circle
of fifths, scales etc. are not necessary an element of music. IOW a
musician could use an easy to remember pattern, that even while it is a
pattern, can't be produced by using hacker software to generate
patterns. It requires either a human musician or a recording played by a
human musician.

It's too funny that the very important things, such as online banking
even don't allow to use any wanted char pattern, they limit it by
enforcing a pattern, such as use chars + numbers + special chars out of
a very limited group of special chars. It's even not possible to use
Diceware to generate some passphrases, because just words a not
accepted.

Btw. if I do not want to use a password at all, but the password can't
be disabled, I'm using 1234 when ever possible or stay with a 0000
default passphrase. It's insane that settings for a television set or a
tablet used only at home and only for artwork are password protected. It
would be way better if passwords are only used whre passwords make
sense. It's also insane that security experts made modern car keys less
secure than conventionally car keys. Today a thief even don't need to
spend a few seconds for hot-wiring a car and the thief don't need to
have any skills, such as how to hot-wire a car. There's no need to have
the muscles to break the steering lock. Nowadays just pushing a button
is all a thief needs to do.

Be careful with academical theories regarding security and don't trust
experts too much. A little bit of horse sense should be used in addition
to hints from experts.