On Sat, Dec 26, 2015 at 6:37 PM, Owen DeLong <owen@delong.com> wrote:
On Dec 26, 2015, at 15:54 , Baldur Norddahl <baldur.norddahl@gmail.com> wrote:
[...]
The key approach is still better. Even if the password is 123456 the attacker is not going to get in, unless he somehow stole the key file.
Incorrect… It is possible the attacker could brute-force the key file.
A 1024 bit key is only as good as a ~256 character passphrase in terms of entropy.
If you are brute force or otherwise synthesizing the private key, you do not need the passphrase for the on-disk key. As was pointed out elsewhere, the passphrase for the key file only matters if you already stole the key file.
In terms of guessing the private key vs. guessing a suitably long pass phrase, the difficulty is roughly equivalent.
Intriguing point. I was thinking about it from the end-user perspective; but you're right, from the bits-on-the-wire perspective, it's all just a stream of 1's and 0's, whether it came from a private key + passphrase run through an algorithm or not. Thanks for the reminder to look at it from multiple perspectives. ^_^ Matt