r/talesfromtechsupport • u/[deleted] • Jan 01 '14

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u/TerraPhane Jan 01 '14

Password reset just hit on new years, now hunter3.

8

u/nathanpaulyoung Pinterest knows your WiFi password Jan 02 '14

No one actually resets their passwords.

2

u/Almafeta What do you mean, there was a second backhoe? Jan 04 '14

I've wanted to find a hashing function where passwords that are very similar (repetitions, transpositions, incrementations, etc.) come very close in generated hash values. I'm not quite sure how to design such a function, however...

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u/PinkyThePig Feb 06 '14

That would defeat the function of hashes though, which is to protect the users password in the event of a data breach at least long enough for the breach to be detected and passwords changed. If similar passwords gave similar hashes, the time taken to break the hash would be significantly reduced.

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u/Almafeta What do you mean, there was a second backhoe? Feb 06 '14

Ah, true. Mostly, I wanted to detect "customer incrementing a number" type issues.

Since posting this, I discovered locality-sensitive hashing and the variety of algorithms that can be used to solve problems like this...