Passwords: yet another silly idea.

[Jack Jansen]

Reading the whole passwords discussion, I've just come up with
my first silly idea for 1989:

How about making encryption of passwords take time inversely
proportional to the passwords' complexity?

In other words: if your password consists of lower-case only
you encrypt it 1000/strlen(password) times. Divide by two if it contains a digit or
an upper case char. Divide by 4 for every non-alphanumeric.
Divide by 8 for every control char. etc etc.

Now, every time a novice user logs in with a password that is
too simple, you notify him/her that logging in will only take
2 seconds in stead of the current 30 seconds if he/she changes the
password to something more complicated.

That'll educate them, Hah!
--
Fight war, not wars			| Jack Jansen, jack at cwi.nl
Destroy power, not people! -- Crass	| (or mcvax!jack)