Safe authentication considerations

[jlpell]

Yes, going off topic a bit. We have this one already.

What is a good strategy for choosing account secret and password?

So 4 common dictionary words used as a password, such as correcthorsebatterystaple, offers around 5,000 to the power of 4 combinations , or around 6×10^14. EDIT: We’re not sure how XKCD got to 2^44, as a brute force of that would take a maximum of around 2 x 10^35 attempts, which we think was the point he was trying to make . Hmm… xkcd is using a 2048 words list in his example (11 bits per word / 44 bits for 4 words). Of course it’s more safe to have a long generated password, but at some po…