With large computing power (like what you can get in the Amazon cloud for exampl

Question

With large computing power (like what you can get in the Amazon cloud for example) you can generate huge rainbow tables for passwords. There also seems to be some large rainbow tables reachable that you have to pay for.

What are the largest tables that secret services could possibly use and what's the maximum characters you can have for the password?

I am wondering how long passwords should be considered when you choose a new password yourself? (This is not the question here!)

What is the maximum password-length those huge underground rainbow-tables (used by evil forces) are hosting?

Explanation / Answer

I am the author of the http://passwordcreator.org/ website. I built the site because I wanted an easier way to generate secure passwords for myself. While doing the research for the site, I learned a great deal about secure passwords.

There are distributed password crackers out there that can make 100 billion guesses per second. The NSA which is government sponsored (large budget) may be able to do an order of magnitude more.

To be secure for a year or more from this type of attack, your password must be chosen randomly from several quintillion possibilities. For password constructed randomly from the 95 characters available on most keyboards, that means that you need at a password that is at least 10 characters long for decent security right now.

If you password is generated in other ways (there are several algorithms available on my site), your password may have to be even longer to achieve the same resistance against guessing.

At 10 characters, I pretty much have to write down my random password. If that is the case for you as well, I would recommend that you increase the length to at least 14 characters which will remain secure for a longer period of time.

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