3

Is it a great idea to make passwords with special characters from your language? (If you have it)

BTW it´s not allowed on every website.

Is it a way to make it a bit harder for hackers to crack your password?

schroeder
  • 125,553
  • 55
  • 289
  • 326
Nvoms
  • 33
  • 1
  • 3
  • 1
    As long as the site doesn't strip the special characters. – Samuel Shifterovich Oct 01 '16 at 21:45
  • Alphanumeric passwords get exponentially harder to crack for each additional character you put on them. Just make a nice long passphrase and you should be good, no need to go further inventive with special symbols. – Havenard Oct 02 '16 at 05:23
  • 3
    Dupe http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/4632/do-non-keyboard-characters-make-my-password-less-susceptible-to-brute-forcing but see http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/5694/why-limit-passwords-to-ascii-printable-characters http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/17192/why-disallow-special-characters-in-a-password http://security.stackexchange.com/questions/137320/why-no-different-languages-in-passwords/ – dave_thompson_085 Oct 02 '16 at 11:10

2 Answers2

3

The standard Latin alphabet contains 26 letters, which means that there are (26*2)^8=5.346*10^13 8-letters, case-sensitive passwords.

The Danish alphabet, as an example of Latin alphabet with additional characters, contains 29 letters, which means there are (29*2)^8=4.308*10^17 8-letters, case-sensitive passwords.

As you can see, adding three letters in the alphabet can increase the number of possible combinations by a very significant factor (in this case, ~ 10,000).

As usual, there are a few catches.

1) If the website accepts your password, but strips the special characters, your approach is useless (thanks Samuel Shifterovich).

2) Don't think that an attacker could never guess that your password is, say, indløse just because it contains a special character. Whatever language you use, a single word from a dictionary will be easily found.

A. Darwin
  • 3,592
  • 2
  • 16
  • 27
0

To make the alphabet to compose your password of larger, it is not necessary to use special characters outside the ASCII range.

You may just let your alphabet contain additional words from large dictionaries. The correct battery horse staple illustrates this technique.

aventurin
  • 226
  • 1
  • 2
  • 7