Strength of passwords?

guessing the password would be next to impossible and you would need a computer program to crunch the millions of options to find the right one unlikely i would have thought and not worth the bother unless its the password for the bank of England vault or something

Everyone above is wrong.

a. 26 (number of letters in alphanet) to the power of 6 which equals 308915776

b. 26 (number of letters to the alphanet) to the power of 4 which equals 456976, then multiplied by 10 (number of numbers from 0 to 9) to the power of 4 (which is 10000) which equals 4569760000

c. 26 (numbers of letters in the alphabet) to the power of 15 which equals a hell of a lot but my calculator doesn't have enough digits.

Where people are going wrong on answer (b), the password is a mixture of 4 letters and 4 numbers, not 8 letters or numbers.

Obviously, these are all the maximum number of attempts it would take to solve the password and the right combination could be hit within as many attempts.

It depends on how fast you can send the passwords but I can tell you how many possible combinations there are.

a) If this is a real word then the answer is how many six letter words there are. If it's just 6 random letters then it

26^6 = 308915776

b) 36^8 = 2821109907456

c) 26^15 ~ 1.677259342285726e+21 ~ 1677259342285726000000

Added:

darn it - Steve B is right, my bad for misreading the question.

this is a debatable subject count. frequently, the conventional consumer is susceptible to apply a password that he will bear in mind, alongside with an actually be conscious interior the dictionary. Such passwords are susceptible because of the fact they're predictable and decreases the randomness, or entropy, of the password. to that end, those policies wish to boost the randomness of the password and likewise furnish added bits of entropy. the subject is, maximum folk finally end up including a single variety to the tip of their password or merely capitalize the final letter, which defeats the objective of imposing those policies and does not help lots in increasing the randomness of the password. From a usability point of view, it is likewise extra stable to bear in mind alphanumeric passwords with some top-cased letters. there is not any precise answer if those policies are mandatory.

It'l take 2 days to solve

using a computer or manually?

a) 26x26x26x26x26x26x26= 308915776

b) 37x37x37x37x37x37x37x37=...

b) 26x 26x 26x 26x 26x 26x 26x 26x 26x 26x 26x 26x 26x 26x 26=...