Passphrase: Passwords made simple

Araiz Rashiq Rind
4 min readMay 11, 2021

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Passphrases are becoming the new norm in the IT world. Passphrase are passwords constructed using phrases which makes them longer and harder to crack. Passphrases provide more security as compared to traditional passwords. As we are heading into more IT driven words and are surrounded by computers everywhere, the need for stronger passwords are becoming more and more. Cybercriminals are more sophisticated and can almost hack any computer and most of the passwords even with the most strongest of combinations. As to date the Cybercrime industry is worth more than $800 billion dollars and the numbers are increasing drastically every day. Almost every day individuals, organizations and Governments falls on the hand of Cybercriminals and get affected.

The Passphrase pretty much deals with the problem. They are more secure and harder to crack. They are longer and easier to remember than our traditional passwords which are very hard to remember but easier to crack. Humans have spent a long time on passwords which are combinations of alphanumeric characters, symbols and special characters but as a result we have only come up with passwords which are hard for us to remember and easier for computers to crack. Passphrase are the solution to that. Passphrase is very simple to set for example let’s take a very common phrase which we use in everyday life which is very easy to remember. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire”. Now let’s construct a Passphrase in other words a password from this phrase, it is “outofpanintofire”. Simple alphabets, no numbers, no special characters and easy to remember and the best part is it is very secure. This password has almost 60 bits of entropy although it has one of the most commonly used words in it but still its a strong password for many and would require a highly skilled hacker to crack it and would depend greatly on implementation. Also very easy to remember, no more incorrect attempts and locking yourself out of your computer.

Photo by Jason Dent on Unsplash

Passphrases is becoming the new norm in the IT world. Passphrase are passwords constructed using phrases which makes them longer and harder to crack. Pass phrases provide more security as compared to traditional passwords. As we are heading into more IT driven words and are surrounded by computers everywhere, the need for stronger passwords are becoming more and more. Cybercriminals are more sophisticated and can almost hack any computer and most of the passwords even with the most strongest of combinations. As to date the Cybercrime industry is worth more than $800 billion dollars and the numbers are increasing drastically every day. Almost every day individuals, organizations and Governments falls on the hand of Cybercriminal and get affected.

The Passphrase pretty much deals with the problem. They are more secure and harder to crack. They are longer and easier to remember than our traditional passwords which are very hard to remember but easier to crack. Humans have spent a long time on passwords which are combinations of alphanumeric characters, symbols and special characters but as a result we have only come up with passwords which are hard for us to remember and easier for computers to crack. Passphrase are the solution to that. Passphrase is very simple to set for example let’s take a very common phrase which we use in everyday life which is very easy to remember. “Out of the frying pan, into the fire”. Now let’s construct a Passphrase in other words a password from this phrase, it is “outofpanintofire”. Simple alphabets, no numbers, no special characters and easy to remember and the best part is it is very secure. This password has almost 60 bits of entropy although it has one of the most commonly used words in it but still its a strong password for many and would require a highly skilled hacker to crack it and would depend greatly on implementation. Also very easy to remember, no more incorrect attempts and locking yourself out of your computer.

But at the same time if you set a password like ‘Tr0ub4der&3’ which contains alphabets, numbers and special characters which has 49 bits of entropy, making it more prone to hacking at the same time compared to Passphrase. Why? because it is more near to computer and computer knows all these tricks and techniques. Also, you’ll have more trouble remembering this password like “Was it Trombone? How many 0’s it had?” and other irregularities like that.

Passphrases are easy to remember and easy to set like you could join any three or four words and make a Passphrase from them, in an instant of time.

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