Along with birthdays, names of pets and ascending number sequences, add one more thing to the list of password no-nos: good grammar. An algorithm developed by Ashwini Rao and colleagues at Carnegie Mellon University in Pittsburgh, Pennsylvania, makes light work of cracking long passwords which make grammatical sense as a whole phrase, even if they are interspersed with numbers and symbols. Rao’s algorithm makes guesses by combining words and phrases from password-cracking databases into grammatically correct phrases. While other cracking programs make multiple guesses based on each word in a database, putting in “catscats” and “catsstac” as well as just the word “cats”, none of the programs make the jump to combine multiple words or phrases in a way that makes grammatical sense, like “Ihave3cats”, for instance.
About Shelly Palmer
Shelly Palmer is the Professor of Advanced Media in Residence at Syracuse University’s S.I. Newhouse School of Public Communications and CEO of The Palmer Group, a consulting practice that helps Fortune 500 companies with technology, media and marketing. Named LinkedIn’s “Top Voice in Technology,” he covers tech and business for Good Day New York, is a regular commentator on CNN and writes a popular daily business blog. He's a bestselling author, and the creator of the popular, free online course, Generative AI for Execs. Follow @shellypalmer or visit shellypalmer.com.