Recent research by Georgia Tech Research Institute (GTRI) suggests that new hardware developments could dramatically improve a hacker’s ability to crack passwords. The hardware they’ve been testing is a Graphical Processing Unit., commonly used to process huge amounts of data very quickly for today’s computer games. This development puts super-computer type power on everyday desktop computers. The GTRI article is here: http://www.gtri.gatech.edu/casestudy/Teraflop-Troubles-Power-Graphics-Processing-Units-GPUs-Password-Security-System
CNN caught wind of this research, and interviewed one of the researchers. The additional information is quite useful: http://www.cnn.com/2010/TECH/innovation/08/20/super.passwords/index.html
The bottom line is that hackers will now be able to crack passwords much more quickly than in the past. As a result, we’ll need to make our passwords more complex and difficult to guess. The researchers are recommending minimum 12 character passwords, if the website you’re logging into will accommodate them.
This article from the Carnegie Melon School of Computer Science provides some good advice about choosing good passwords and includes a couple of interesting techniques to do it. http://www.cs.cmu.edu/~help/security/choosing_passwords.html
One of the techniques they suggest is to make up a sentence that contains letters, numbers and symbols. The sentence should be something easy to remember such as “My grand daughter Allison was born in Detroit in ’06.” Then use the first letter of each word plus the symbols – MgdwbiDi’06
If you use this technique and combine it with my previous ‘base-word ‘ technique of adding letters to the base word for each website, you’ll create strong unique passwords for every site that requires passwords.
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