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Unread 07-01-2016, 13:08
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JesseK JesseK is offline
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Re: FRC 2016 Game Manual

About Passwords - plenty of people understand things like rainbow tables, context dictionaries and salt generators. I'm guessing FIRST doesn't, but understands that those types of things exist. So they're waiting to release the manual itself until the time it takes to employ those is more than the time until kickoff. Or perhaps the new website is having major issues (always plausible).

For example, it makes no sense for aaaaaaaaaaa, aaaaaaaaaab, aaaaaaaaaac (etc) to be tried - so just skip them. Most passwords, especially recent FIRST passwords, have game context around them. So l33t variants and grammatical substitutions can be applied to a more context-sensitive set of passwords (on something like Stronghold or its theme) to reduce the probable password set down to a few hundred million combinations. This is crack-able in a few days.

Adding grammar and numbers to a password increases the bit entropy of the password. Adding context to a cracker's rainbow table obliterates bit entropy. Yet making a diceware-based password increases information entropy to the point where a dictionary-based cracking attempt is completely obsolete while maintaining a sense of reason in how the password is disseminated on Game Day. The game manual could then be up a week ahead of time, presuming final edits are done.

I'm not an expert in cryptography, but the math behind information entropy is really enjoyable to read about, IMO.
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Last edited by JesseK : 07-01-2016 at 13:12.
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