Quoting "IT3 Stuart B. Tener, USNR-R" <stuart@xxxxxxxxxxx>: > Mr. Ruusu: > > So if I understand you correctly, it is the "seed" which is allowing us > to > choose our own less secure phrases, and the seed makes it that much > tougher? > So buy using the longest "bitwise" seed we can, we are more able to feel > comfortable with lower entropy phrases? > I believe what we are talking about is called a "salt" in the literature. It does not have any effect on the difficulty of attacking a single target (because the attacker knows the salt) but it removes an economy of scale that can be used when trying to break any one of a large number of targets simultaneously: precomputing the hashes of a large number of possible passphrases. If you do a search for "cryptographic salt", you'll probably find a fuller description of the concept. In short, it is a good feature to have, but it is not the same as having a better passphrase, except in certain circumstances. In particular, it does not need to be very large to have the effect of eliminating the only attack it is useful against, so there is no real advantage to making it larger. -- Andrew McGuinness Luton, UK a.mcguinness@xxxxxxxxxxxx Linux-crypto: cryptography in and on the Linux system Archive: http://mail.nl.linux.org/linux-crypto/
