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Showing posts from December, 2008

More Language Issues

But this time it's with English. I've been working on several conference papers, (hence the scarcity of posts here), and one problem I keep running into time after time is the lack of standard terminology when it comes to password cracking. Here are some examples of that: 1) What exactly is a passphrase? Would 'manbearpig' count as a passphrase? How about 'superdude'? What about passwords created by the first letters of a phrase. For example, "To be or not to be" = '2bo!2b' Should the above example be called a password or a passphrase? Can the term password and passphrase be used interchangeably?  2) What exactly is covered by the term 'Brute Force Attack'? If you try all combinations where the first four characters are lowercase letters, and the last two characters are numbers, is it a brute force attack? Side note, I'm a fan of the term 'targeted brute force attack' for the above option. I've seen 'indexed attack&#