Reasons to Use Passphrase over a password | IT Support – Kiwiz Consulting
As a small business, you want to make sure that your employees and customers can trust the security of your computer systems. Passwords are an integral part of any computing system and it is important to know what makes one more secure than another.
The difference between a password and a passphrase is that passwords are made up with common words or phrases while passphrases use long strings of words. Passphrases have the benefit of being difficult for hackers to crack because they require exponentially more time to guess correctly due to their length, Plus they are easier to remember by humans. Passphrases also pose less risk in terms of compromising customer data if someone has access credentials since they would need physical access as well as knowledge about the specific type of encryption.
So why is passphrase better than passwords?
- Passphrases are easier to remember than a random of symbols and letters combined together. It would be easier to remember a phrase from your favorite song or your favorite quotation than to remember a short but complicated password.
- Passwords are relatively easy to guess or crack by both human and robots. The online criminals have also leveled up and developed state of the art hacking tools that are designed to crack even the most complicated password.
- Satisfies complex rules easily. The use of punctuation, upper and lower cases in Passphrases also meets the complexity requirements for passwords.
- Major OS and applications supports passphrase. All major OS including Windows, Linux and Mac allow pass-phrases of up to 127 characters long. Hence, you can opt for longer passphrases for maximum security.
- Passphrases are next to impossible to crack because most of the highly-efficient password cracking tools breaks down at around 10 characters. Hence, even the most advanced cracking tool won’t be able to guess, brute-force or pre-compute these passphrases.
The website Random Passphrase Generator is a classic example of this. Great website to use when creating new passphrases.