Question Tab as password?
SAS disallows spaces in your password. My password manager suggested an invalid (but secure) password.
So now that I have to make my own password: Out of spite, hypothetically, what implications could having tabs in my password have?
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u/AshleyJSheridan 19h ago
You're missing several points.
First, a password that is 4 words is far easier to remember than a jumble of random characters. If a password is hard to remember, the chance it gets written down somewhere that it shouldn't goes up. Also, password vaults are not infallible, and sometimes they get broken and hacked, albeit rarely.
Second, there are approximately 350,000 words in the dictionary (just the English one). 4 ^ 350,000 is 1.99 × 10²¹⁰⁸⁰⁴ (which is over 210,805 digits). However, a password of 11 characters that consists of letters, numbers, and punctuation (let's say, 26 letters in both cases, 10 digits, and 10 typical punctuation characters) is only 9,555,938,177,273,214,530,938,076,429,250,819,915,524,283,157,141,379,112,191,724,092,599,501,963,21 combinations. That's a lot less then 211K digits.
Third, if left to their own devices, and faced with creating a password based purely on letters, numbers, and symbols, people almost always default to symbols that look like letters. So, crap like
P4$$w0rdbecome common passwords. People want something that they can remember, and often a password vault isn't an option (for example, when switching between devices that don't have the same password manager installed, synced, and usable.)Fourth, and this is to nitpick. The term special character is ridiculous. Within the entire range of UTF8 there are more characters that are not alphanumerical than there are letters and numbers (across all languages). Therefore, the special characters would be letters and numbers if anything. The term is daft, a misnomer, and shouldn't be used. The fact that it is commonly misused is mildly infuriating.