Wifi password how long

Actually, 12 characters is sufficient ; that gives you 71 bits of entropy, which is also more than sufficient for security against all of the attacks that attackers might try to attack your password. Once your password is 12 characters or longer, the password is extremely unlikely to be the weakest link in your system. Therefore, there's not much point choosing a longer password.

I see people who recommend using a character password, but I don't think there's any rational basis for doing so. My view is that usability is very important: if you make the security mechanism too hard to use, people will get annoyed and may be more reluctant to use it in the future, which isn't good.

A secure mechanism that isn't used isn't doing anyone any good. That's why I prefer to choose a shorter password, like 12 characters or 16 characters in length, as it is perfectly adequate and more usable than a monstrous character beast.

Be careful how you choose the password. For instance, here is a simple script I use on Linux:. Don't try to choose passwords yourself. Human-chosen passwords are typically easier to guess than a truly random password.

One very important caveat: There are other issues as well, beyond password length. This question has been asked many times before, a 12 character password that has numbers,signs, lower and upper case letters will take a very long time to bruteforce. If your password is not present in a dictionary, then you will need to use a bruteforce attack. We can do an estimation on the amount of passwords tried:.

Then you will have:. I wrote up a little script in Perl for you at the bottom. You should be able to interpret it and get your answer with a calculator as well, though. Remember that if your password is in a dictionary or short enough to produce Rainbow tables for that the effective strength is much weaker that would otherwise be calculated. Benchmark PBKDF2 to determine how fast a password can be tested Lucas points out , with some heavy graphics hardware.

Note that Rainbow tables will be a factor if you have a common SSID name "linksys" , but won't be if you have something much more obscure. There's really no one-size-fits-all answer for this.

The short of it comes down to this: If you want a proper balance of security and usability that's right for you , make the password as long and complex as you can tolerate. For me personally, I have no qualms about setting a character randomly-generated PSK on my access points. Yes, it may be difficult to enter into smart-devices and such.

But the thing I keep reminding myself with this is that I only need to enter it one time per device. Adding new devices to my network is a relatively rare and insignificant occurrence, in comparison to the amount of time I actually use the network and the security enhancement of a nigh-unbreakable password.

If you can't live with punching in a character randomly-generated password one time per device on your network, scale it down until you get to something more easily digestible for yourself. Perhaps find a sensible way to make a long, seemingly-random password that actually makes sense to you.

Depending on how far you want to go to secure your network, you may also want to consider defense-in-depth additions such as MAC address filtering, network partitioning i. What really matters is how much entropy your password contains. The problem is "entropy compared to what"? If your password is in the attacker's word dictionary, then it has less than 8 bits of entropy even if it is using a wide mix of character types, e. If there is a letter in there somewhere, all letters have to be checked on every character.

Using all lowercase letters with a single digit in the password somewhere increases the search space to Adding a capital letter increases it to 62, and so on.

When multiplied by the number of characters in the password, it has an exponential effect on the number of possible guesses required. By way of example: A 16 letter password using only lower case letters yields a brute force time of about 14 years. The effectiveness of brute forcing tools increasing rapidly with computing power, but this tool uses a very conservative estimate for the guess rate to compensate.

To be sure, base your results on the last option Massive Cracking Array Scenario. Even today, this is an unlikely rate for real world hackers , but with dedicated FPGA cracking hardware out there. You may be skeptical about putting your password into a webpage, but remember that the password in isolation is useless without context what is it the password for?

Also note that the tool does not take your password anywhere. The calculations are done purely in your browser by embedded scripts. As the note on the haystacks page points out, length and a large search space are useless if the password is in a dictionary, so we need to consider what we use in the password as well.

Therefore it is just a matter of time until even long and complex passphrases no longer offer sufficient protection. At the moment, password length is one of the last lines of defense against attacks like these which has not been defeated - yet. Unlike KRACK, a successful compromise using this approach allows for full access to a Wifi network and therefore has more potential for damage. On the other hand, one must be very selective about what to intercept when using KRACK - the attack does not allow for large scale exfiltration of data.

The first devices to support WPA3 are expected to be introduced in the near future. What is not clear, however, is which devices are going to receive updates to enable support for the new protocol. It is very likely that older routers will not receive an update which enables WPA3 support, whereas more current models will likely do so. Despite the introduction of the new standard, WPA2 will not disappear completely any time soon, and will be supported alongside WPA3 by most routers.

Therefore there is no need to fear that your old tablet will suddenly refuse to talk to your new router. It will take some time, though, until WPA3 has been introduced on a broad basis. We take a look at…. On Monday, reports emerged about the encryption of WiFi networks being susceptible to attacks. Free is free!

Come get it! Ah no. I would post in twitter and let the army work for me in finding them! Known for his quirky posters and viral marketing stunts, Rochat took social media by storm last year when he pranked citizens by sticking airpod stickers on the ground to make them believe the expensive device had been dropped by mistake.