is there any remote possibility to recover passphrase?

Robert J. Hansen rjh at sixdemonbag.org
Sun Jan 20 03:14:36 CET 2008


me at greenest.org wrote:
> So if the strenght of passphrase is something like 25 chars (a-Z,0-9,non 
> alphanumeric) I can rest assured nobody today or in a year could possibly 
> decrypt even someone with a distributed super calculus hardware power, is it? 

Depends.  English text has about 1.5 bits of entropy per glyph, so this 
is about 37 bits of entropy, assuming English text.  That can be 
exhausted via brute force.

If the passphrase is totally random, then you're looking at about 150 
bits of entropy, which is impractical to exhaust via brute force, ever.

As with so many things in crypto, the answer here is "it depends."




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