Pass-phrases vs. passwords

[Robert Parker]

On Wednesday 16 February 2005 00:52, you wrote:
> Even though this comes from a tainted source, it's still an
> interesting discussion about the use of "pass phrases" vs. passwords:
>
> "Do you see a pattern here?  Pass-phrase LENGTH, not complexity
> defeats these attacks.  Short, but complex passwords should be shunned
> as they are not truly secure anymore and you are deceiving yourself if
> you think they are.  Long pass-phrases (14 characters or more) are the
> future (along with 2-factor or more authN, but that's another blog for
> another day) and are the only way to go if you want to ensure that you
> won't get hacked via any type of password based attack of any kind."

Ok, it's fairly obvious that the longer your password the more secure. Even 
if you want to call your long password a passphrase that's fine. But, the 
last I heard, Windows folds everything to upper case and truncates the pw/pp 
to 8 characters anyway. If that's true, any use of a passphrase in that 
system is just delusional.

I very happily can't speak from experience here, I do have a Windows 
partition but have not booted it for the last 25 months.

Bob