this post was submitted on 28 Apr 2024
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Terrible article. Even worse advice.
On iOS at least, if you’re concerned about police breaking into your phone, you should be using a high entropy password, not a numeric PIN, and biometric auth is the best way to keep your convenience (and sanity) intact without compromising your security. This is because there is software that can break into a locked phone (even one that has biometrics disabled) by brute forcing the PIN, bypassing the 10 attempts limit if set, as well as not triggering iOS’s brute force protections, like forcing delays between attempts. If your password is sufficiently complex, then you’re more likely to be safe against such an attack.
I suspect the same is true on Android.
Such a search is supposed to require a warrant, but the tool itself doesn’t check for it, so you have to trust the individual LEOs in question to follow the law. And given that any 6 digit PIN can be brute forced in under 11 hours (40 ms per entry), this means that if you were arrested (even for a spurious charge) and held overnight, they could search your phone without you knowing.
With a password that has the same entropy as 10 random digits, assuming no further vulnerabilities allowing them to speed up the process, it could take up to 12 and a half years to brute force it. Make it alphanumeric (and still random) and it’s millions of years - infeasible within our lifetime - it’s basically a question of whether another vulnerability is already known or is discovered that enables bypassing the password entirely / much faster rates of entry.
If you’re in a situation where you expect to interact with law enforcement, then disable biometrics. Practice ahead of time to make sure you know how to do it on your phone.
Also, don't use regular passwords with random letters and numbers, they are really hard to remember and easier to crack if the password isn't complex enough. Instead, use a passphrase with at least 5 words.
Is that safe though? After seeing that XKCD I also thought it would be a good idea but then read that using passphrases is even worse because brute force attacks often use dictionaries as well to test word combinations, so one should use scrambled characters, just long enough to resist brute force.
The XKCD comic uses the entropy of common words assuming an informed cracker is using the best tools at their disposal, that being a dictionary attack. That's why the entroy per character of the passphrase is so low compared to that of the special character password, but the passphrase can be much longer because it's easier to remember, so that's what gives it its higher total entropy.
Explain XKCD goes into more detail about how the calculation was done: https://www.explainxkcd.com/wiki/index.php/936:_Password_Strength
Thanks for the clarification. So I can surmise that length is everything then? Given that I use a password manager I'll just stick to my long gibberish passwords in that case, but it's good to keep passphrases in mind for use cases where I can't copy/paste easily.
Oh yeah, long gibberish passwords are strong. Keepass will tell me I have 137 bits of entropy on my password for instance, and that's proper secure.
The Tr0ub4dor or whatever example in the comic assumes again an informed hacker using long random words and common substitutions, so you don't have the full 56+ possibilities per character, it's constrained to a very limited set. This is a pretty common password construction
For instance when I was in IT some government agency required our company to adhere to some security requirements before we could handle their data. Everyone went from 3-letter usernames + identical passwords to having a long word + numbers + characters. HOWEVER because nobody can remember these fucking things, every single password was a home address with the exception of a handful of month or person names which I assume were birthdays or kids. How do I know these secret passwords? Well, because they STILL couldn't remember them, we had to...
I'm so sorry.
...keep everybody's password in our own encrypted excell spreadsheet, so if anybody forgot, the IT team could read them all in plaintext to get people logged in. One person was so bad at remembering that I had their password memorised myself, and when I stopped pretending to look it up they stopped asking. Idk if they were shamed into remembering it or they just kept it in their wallet or something.
Also we needed secure server racks and encrypted drives etc. The server rack was a doozy - the handle was an intentional weak point to prevent forcing the lock, so I accidentally ripped it clean off with my bare hands one morning when the lock was slightly stuck. It took a while to get that fixed and I was exremely lucky I managed to jimmy it open using the nub of the destroyed handle. I couldn't close it again so it sure wasn't secure once that happened.
Security theatre, the lot of it. We spent six figures nationwide getting ready for that contract and the work they gave us was about four figures worth.
The entire corporate world is like this. If you wonder why your data keeps getting breached, this is why.