SecuriTeam Blogs » Simple passwords are the solution
ZDNet has a nice piece on why cheap GPU’s are making strong passwords useless. They are right, of course (though it’s pretty much been that way for 20 years, since the need for /etc/shadow) but they missing the obvious solution to the problem.
The solution is not to make passwords more complex. It’s making them less complex (so that users can actually remember them) and making sure brute force is impossible. We know how to do that, we just have to overcome a generation-old axiom about trivial passwords being easy to break (they are not, if you only get very few tries).
It’s not just cheap GPUs. Complex passwords are also the problem. Simple passwords are the solution.
Right on the spot. With the evolution of brute forcing techniques we shouldn't be trying to fight those attacks with complex passwords; properly salted hashes and thorough protection of the offline password (I mean hashes) databases is far more important than that. Online brute forcing can be handled with simple techniques such as timeouts, account locking and CAPTCHAs.
Of course, whenever the residual risk after all those measures is still not acceptable, better to go the two-factor way instead of adding complexity to the passwords. Let's stop trying to improve this control, accept its use cases and limitations and use different controls where context and risk require that.