zxcvbn VS duckduckgo-locales

Lightweight is an understatement here.

A client's project (with not necessarily technical customers) has had pretty reasonable success using the Dropbox originated library[1] for this, `zxcvbn`[2], on both frontend via js (for "instant" feedback) and on the backend via php (to enforce the requirements when writing password hashes to the database)

1: https://dropbox.tech/security/zxcvbn-realistic-password-stre...

2: https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn

use zxcvbn to check your password strength more thoroughly

source if anyone wants the whole list https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn/blob/master/data/passwords.txt

Password strength is evaluated based on the zxcvbn library.

In contrast, let's consider the password "zxcvbn214". How might we assign an entropy to this password? Is it 369? Or 266 * 103? Anyone familiar with a QWERTY keyboard or Dropbox's password strength estimator knows that "zxcvbn" is hardly a random sequence of letters. This same principle applies to "l33t" speak, e.g. replacing all "e"s with 3s and "a"s with 4s. These strategies may "trick" simple entropy calculations into estimating a high entropy, but it won't trick sophisticated attackers. This leads to strength over-estimation, which is, I argue, the worst thing we can do in this context.

> except for ZXCVBN

You mean the Low-Budget Password Strength Estimator?

https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn

Yeah, that name is totally legit.

For any part of the password that the zxcvbn cannot match to a known pattern, it uses a brute-force cardinality of 10, i.e., it estimates that the number of guesses required to crack a password or password segment of length N is equal to 10N (equivalent to the number of guesses required to exhaust all possibilities if your password consisted only of numbers).

We took a similar approach to passphrase stretching in EnvKey[1] v1 (EnvKey is a secrets manager, not a passwords manager, but uses end-to-end encryption in a similar way). We used PBKDF2 with iterations set a bit higher than the currently recommended levels, as well as Dropbox's zxcvbn lib to try to identify and block weak passphrases.

Ultimately, I think it's just not good enough. Even if you're updating iteration counts automatically (which is clearly not a safe assumption, and to be fair not something we did in EnvKey v1 either), and even with safeguards against weak passphrases, using human-generated passphrases as a single line of defense is just fundamentally weak.

That's why in EnvKey v2, we switched to primarily using high entropy device-based keys--a lot like SSH private keys, except that on Mac and Windows the keys get stored in the OS keychain rather than in the file system. Also like SSH, a passphrases can optionally be added on top.

The downside (or upside, depending how you look at it) is that new devices must be specifically granted access. You can't just log in and decrypt on a new device with only your passphrase. But the security is much stronger, and you also avoid all this song and dance around key stretching iterations.

1 - https://github.com/envkey/envkey

2 - https://github.com/dropbox/zxcvbn

AI Chat is separate from the search engine. On the search engine we have DuckAssist, which is currently grounded in Wikipedia (more sources coming): https://duckduckgo.com/?q=what+is+the+stoichiometric+ratio+b...

that one is good, but I detest keyboards with their own magic little dongle since it's a damn fine thing to misplace

I'm surprised OP didn't enjoy https://www.microsoft.com/en-us/d/surface-ergonomic-keyboard... which is currently listed as out of stock but I dunno if that means "permanently" or what, but they seem to be available via 3rd party channels

Its "klacking" aside, pour one out for https://duckduckgo.com/?q=microsoft+natural+elite+keyboard&t... which I loved, although I'll be straight that I love the Surface Ergonomic better because I think its keytravel is much, much nicer and no weirdo + shaped cursor keys, the inverted T like $diety intended

Sculpture can be tactile. I know it's not purely tactile, but thinking of it in that way is becoming a lot more common (eg at the Louvre). And then I went to find a URL for the tactile dome at the Exploratorium in San Francisco (https://www.exploratorium.edu/visit/tactile-dome) and it turns out there are lots of tactile galleries now:

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=tactile+gallery&t=fpas&ia=web

https://duckduckgo.com/?q=ontario+minimum+automobile+insuran...

https://www.ontario.ca/document/official-mto-drivers-handboo...

https://www.ibc.ca/insurance-basics/auto/types-of-auto-cover...

For the US:

https://www.forbes.com/advisor/car-insurance/minimum-require...

It seems the Mediterranean diet may provide some protection... https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=%E2%80%9CMediterranean+diet...

Have to agree that this isn't a bug. It rather involved being on the other side of this airtight hatchway.

https://duckduckgo.com/?t=ftsa&q=site%3Adevblogs.microsoft.c...