Howdy, As some know, I encrypt a lot of stuff here. I use passwords that I can recall but no one could ever guess. I don't use things that someone may figure out like pet's name or anything like that. I use a couple sites to see just how good my passwords are. I try to get into the millions of years at least. I have a couple that it claims is in the trillions of years to crack. I've read some things not to use like pet names and such. I've also read that one should use upper and lower case letters, symbols and such and I do that, especially on my stuff I never want to be cracked. Some stuff, when I'm dead, it's gone.
In the real world tho, how do people reading this make passwords that no one could ever guess? I use Bitwarden to handle website passwords and it does a good job. I make up my own tho when encrypting drives. I'm not sure I can really use Bitwarden for that given it is a command line thing, well, in a script in my case. I doubt anyone would ever guess any of my passwords but how do people reading this do theirs? Just how far do you really go to make it secure? Obviously you shouldn't give up much detail but just some general ideas. Maybe even a example or two of a fake password, just something that you would come up with and how. This is the two sites I use. https://www.passwordmonster.com/ https://www.security.org/how-secure-is-my-password/ I have a password in the first one that shows this: It would take a computer about 63 thousand years to crack your password Second one says this. It would take a computer about 5 million years to crack your password Exact same password in both. Why such a large range to crack? I tend to use the first site to create a password. Then I test it in the second site to sort of confirm it. If both say a long time, then I got a fairly good one depending on what I'm protecting. Still, why such a difference? One reason I use the first site, I can make it show the password. The second site doesn't do that so editing it to improve things is harder since you can't see it. The first site makes that easy and gives me a idea of whether I'm on the right track. Second site confirms it. I did contact the second site and ask for a button to show the password. After all, no one is here but me. My windows are covered. Also, I use cryptsetup luksFormat -s 512 ... to encrypt things. Is that 512 a good number? Can it be something different? I'd think since it is needed as a option, it can have different values and encrypt stronger or weaker. Is that the case? I've tried to find out but it seems everyone uses 512. If that is the only value, why make it a option? I figure it can have other values but how does that work? Heck, a link to some good info on that would be good. :-) Thoughts? Opinions? Suggestions? Dale :-) :-)
