Brute Force attack - The Importance of Strong Password

Introduction

In cryptography, a Brute Force Attack is a strategy used to break the encryption of data. It involves traversing the search space of possible keys until the correct key is found.

The selection of an appropriate key length depends on the practical feasibility of performing a Brute Force Attack. By obfuscating the data to be encoded, Brute Force Attacks are made less effective as it is more difficult to determine when one has succeeded in breaking the code.


The amount of time required to break a 128-bit key is also daunting. Each of the 2128 (340,282,366,920,938,463,463,374,607,431,768,211,456) possibilities must be checked. A device that could check a billion billion keys (1018) per second would still require about 1013 years to exhaust the key space. This is a thousand times longer than the age of the universe, which is about 13,000,000,000 (1.3×1010) years.

How to avoid Brute Force Attack

Use a Strong Password.

The other way to avoid Brute Force Attack is by using a strong password. Avoid using words in dictionary as there are attacks that has similarity to Brute Force Attack that called Dictionary Attacks. It uses the same technique as Brute Force but Dictionary attack will guess your password based on words in dictionary. Dictionary Attack is quicker compare to Brute Force.
Strong passwords are important protections to help you have safer online transactions. Keys to password strength is length and complexity. An ideal password is long and has letters, punctuation, symbols, and numbers.Create a strong password you can remember

Characteristics of a Strong Password

Whenever possible, use at least 14 characters or more.
The greater the variety of characters in your password, the better.
Use the entire keyboard, not just the letters and characters you use or see most often.

Test your password with a password checker

A password checker evaluates your password's strength automatically. Try our secure password checker.

Avoid creating passwords using:
Dictionary words in any language.
Words in all languages are vulnerable.
Words spelled backwards, common misspellings, and abbreviations.
Words in all languages are vulnerable.
Sequences or repeated characters.
Examples: 12345678, 222222, abcdefg, or adjacent letters on your keyboard (qwerty).
Personal information.
Your name, birthday, driver's license, passport number, or similar information.

Summary

Brute Force Attack is not only being used for unauthorized usage, it also used to recover lost password for certain application. For example, if someone is forgetting their Word Document password, brute force technique can be used to recover the password.

Basically, its depends on the user how they used the software. If the intention is for recover a lost password, then it can be defined as advantage of brute force. But if the intention to crack someone else password, obtaining confidential information, or altering resources, it can be defined as misused of technologies.

The simple thing that you can do to prevent Brute Force Attack is to use a strong password. By using a password that strong enough, it is almost impossible to break your password using Brute Force Attack technique.