From: Eli Brandt <ebrandt@jarthur.cs.hmc.edu>
Date: Sun, 3 Jul 94 20:23:29 PDT
To: cypherpunks list <cypherpunks@toad.com>
Subject: Re: Password Difficulties
In-Reply-To: <9407040148.AA29983@toad.com>
Message-ID: <9407040323.AA01106@toad.com>
MIME-Version: 1.0
Content-Type: text/plain


> There's an interesting issue here:  is it feasible to construct an
> enumeration based on the 50-60 bits of information?

This does present some problems to an attacker.  There's a tradeoff
between the effective key length and the complexity of the enumerator
to generate these keys.  The fancier the model, the lower the
passphrase entropy, but the harder -- and slower -- it becomes to use.
This all seems hard to quantify, though.

   Eli   ebrandt@hmc.edu