Why is 3 random words as a password better than a load of random characters?

Question

Why is 3 random words as a password better than a load of random characters?

In: 52

Answer 1

It depends how many random characters you have.

There’s 95 printable ASCII characters which is more or less all the printable characters on a normal keyboard.

So the number of possible combinations for a random jumble of characters is 95 raised to the number of characters.

There is however over 170.000 English words in the OED. Even if we limit ourselves to top 50% most common words (for ease of memorability) for 3 random choices that’s still 85.000 rasied to 3.

We can see mathematically that you would need at least 8 random characters for your password to have more options than 3 random words.

Now 8 might not seem that long, but consider that 8 totally random unconnected characters is a lot harder to remember than just 3 words.