From the course: Web Security: User Authentication and Access Control
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Dictionary attacks
From the course: Web Security: User Authentication and Access Control
Dictionary attacks
- [Instructor] In this movie, we will discuss dictionary attacks, which are a variation on brute-force attacks. Let's start with a question. Which password would be harder to crack using a brute-force attack? Both of these passwords are the same length and they have the same characters, they're just scrambled around. Using our formulas, they would be considered of equal strength. They have the same key space to search through, and we don't know whether a search is going to begin with the letter A or at the letter Z. Okay, now a second question. Which one of these is more likely to actually be used in the real world? Dictionary is more likely, because users prefer common words for their passwords. Hackers know this, so they prioritize dictionary words first. A dictionary attack is a brute-force attack that prioritizes words in a dictionary over all of the random combinations. It's the same total time to search the…
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