You can use emojis as credentials

Luccus@feddit.de to Linux@lemmy.ml – 378 points –

You can totally use emojis as passwords. You can probably even make this a policy at your company.

Edit: I thought this was an obvious enough joke, but just to clear things up: Only do this if you hate your company and everyone working there.

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And here I am avoiding even special characters because I worry about having to enter them on a French keyboard at some point.

Do be aware that a single emoji is often composed of multiple Unicode characters (e.g. base emoji + gender modifier + skin tone modifier). Entering that on the command line is going to be fun.

On the upside, you could probably satisfy length and complexity requirements with just one emoji. ;)

And here I am avoiding even special characters because I worry about having to enter them on a French keyboard at some point.

I use only special characters that are on the same places with most layouts (at least english and finnish). I suppose passwords with ä or ö might be a bit more resistant to brute-force attacks, but it causes far more problems than it might theoretically solve.

Longer passwords make your passwords exponentially more secure, in terms of security bits. Length matters.

True, and for most credentials I of course use password manager, but things like workstation password are still something I need to manually type out and for those 65 random characters aren't really practical. And for those I use things like 'HorseBattery69+' instead of 'SalainenSäläsänä69+' since while they (could be) equally long and complex the latter is pretty much impossible to type out if keyboard setting is something else than finnish (swedish works too I think).

also nothing that looks the same for the annoying time when you do have to do some analog copying

no I, l, or | and i usually avoid ‘, “, !, /, \ (which one was it again?) and a few others that i have set in my password manager

doesn't matter much, when your password manager is doing the entering

Login passwords are not something your pw manager can type.

They absolutely can

EDIT: Not for OS logins

I believe they mean your OS login, which it cannot

Good point, I thought he meant other logins for some reason.

that happened to me :/

i couldn't login using AZERTY. i thought i fucked up and forgotten my password but no, same letter was encoded as a different character in 2 different languages 🤷

Can you store emojis in KeePass ? 🤔

Why not? Pretty much all software from the past twenty years has been UTF-8 compatible. The issue is more that you may at some point be in a situation where you can't (directly) use your password manager.

Using emoji is a bad idea.

Here is why (without a password manager which removes the hard, but not the incompatible) :

  • some emojis can be inexistent on other devices. So you may not be able to log in on another device.
  • An emoji is hard to remember if you need to type them with an alt code, while also being easy to crack.
  • For a computer, and emoji is nothing else than a character. So hard to type, easy to crack.
  • More likely you use an emoji someone else used. So it could maybe be easier to crack.

And you don't need to believe me https://nordpass.com/blog/emoji-passwords/

NordPass is completely incorrect on the "it makes a password easier to "crack" thing.

I absolutely don't recommend using emojis in your password, as it is far too easy to get locked out. However, a password containing an emoji is significantly harder to crack.

Hashing is a process used to calculate a large number based on some input data. If the input is the same, the output is the same. If the input differs just slightly, the output is completely different. This process is mathematically irreversible. Since this (and other techniques) is often used for passwords, to "crack"/bruteforce a password, the attacker has to go through every possible combination of input data, calculate the hash, and check if the hash is the same as the password hash.

To make the process of bruteforcing a hash quicker, an attacker often makes assumptions about the input data. If they know a password contains 8 characters, and only lowercase letters, this massively narrows down the amount of passwords that need to be hashed and checked. If they know the password contains someones birth year, that too reduces the time to bruteforce a password.

The more possible characters you have per position in your password, the longer it will take to bruteforce. An 8 character password with just lowercase letters has 208.827.064.576 possible combinations. This sounds like a lot, but it's often bruteforced rather quickly. Adding uppercase letters and numbers to that, we're already at 218.340.105.584.896 possible combinations. That's ~1000x more combinations, and that's for 8 characters. It's the difference between bruteforcing taking a day, and taking 1000 days. (Do note an 8 characters lowercase password probably only takes like a few seconds to minutes, not a full day.)

According to https://emojipedia.org/stats there are 3664 different emojis. Lets say we create an 8 emoji password. (some emojis aren't one character internally, the same principle still applies.) Just 8 completely randomly chosen emojis. That password would have 32.482.071.647.592.311.234.920.185.856 different possible combinations. That is about 148.768.232.755.857 times more combinations than an 8 character uppercase+lowercase+numbers password. That is the difference between bruteforcing taking a day or taking 407584199331 years.

The same things as non-emoji passwords still apply, you can make assumptions about which emojis are used. People aren't entirely random, so chances are higher they used some of the more common emojis. However, that is similar to prioritizing the letter "e" because it is more common. Yes, it'll probably reduce the time taken to bruteforce a bunch of passwords, but it's not set in stone that every password will even contain the letter "e".

Again, due to the potential of breaking things, locking yourself out, etc. I DO NOT recommend using emojis. Use a password manager with longer passwords.

However, including an emoji in your password makes it significantly more difficult to bruteforce. As the assumption that the characters in your password are letters, numbers, and symbols no longer holds, which drastically increases the possible number of combinations.

For somewhat more realistic numbers:

According to minerstat.com, an NVidia RTX 4090 has a hashrate of 118.07MH/s. This is 118.07 Megahashes per second, or 118.070.000 hashes per second. For a password with only 8 lowercase letters (208.827.064.576 combinations), it would take an RTX 4090 approximately 1769 seconds (or ~30 minutes) to go through all possible combinations. For an 8 character upper+lower+numbers password (218340105584896 combinations) it would take 1849243 seconds, or 21.4 days.

For an 8 emoji password (32482071647592311234920185856 combinations), it would take 275.108.593.610.504.896.512 seconds, or 8.723.636.276.335 years.

Lets say a magic prediction algorithm reduces the number of possible combinations in each password to 1 out of every 1 million previously possible combinations. 8 lowercase letters would be cracked instantly, while an 8 emoji password would still take 8.723.636 years.

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The times I calculated were indeed going over every possible combination, it would take half as long to crack a password on average. Considering reducing the time to 1/1000000 still leaves you with an incomprehensibly large estimated timespan, dividing that by 2 doesn't do that much for making it brute-forceable.

I did note it was specifically for 8 emojis, not 8 characters or bytes.

And yes, it's very impractical and likely to break things. It's better and much easier to add extra letters, numbers, and symbols to your password rather than using emojis. Using a password manager is even better.

As you stated, a single unicode character would mean your password wouldn't be included with the potential options in almost all brute forcing tools. Whether you use 8 emojis or 1, your password likely won't get brute forced.

All of my "emoji password" numbers are if the attacker knows it's a password containing exactly 8 emojis, and nothing more. Adding a regular symbols+upper+lower+numbers 16 character password would make it even more impossible to brute force.

We are sorry, your request could not be processed. 😊

As you know, at Corp.inc we believe that the most important thing there is, is human connection. ❤️ For this reason, every complaint must contain at least 2 happy emojis or 1 heart.

Please resubmit your concern accordingly. 😉

with love, Corp.inc - Issue Management

An emoji is hard to remember if you need to type them with an alt code, while also being easy to crack.

I hope you meant “easier to crack than to remember it's ALT code”*

They're significantly harder to crack than most other characters, simply as there are much more of them than letters and numbers combined.

For a computer, and emoji is nothing else than a character.

This isn't really true either, they're always composed of 4 or more bytes, which to a computer is 4 or more characters.

Please, don't use subjects like "I love this". Please.

Fair point, will do… at some point in the future.

Edit #1: You people are expecting way too much reasonability from someone using emojis to login.

Edit #2: Urgh! FINE. Have your sensible title that actually means something and betters everyones experience. angrily sips water >:(

You can also use emojis in computer and user names in active directory. Trust me, the network guys love it!

Anything Unicode. You could use box drawing characters.

The Interrogator: "You think you're so funny… WHAT. IS. THE. PASSWORD!!!"

A guy, tied to a chair, bloodied and crying: "Amogus, it's a drawing of the Amogus guy."

The interrogator prepares another round of fists

You can add emojis to your wifi SSID. I do not recommend it for compatibility reasons, though. Your printer might not like it.

In my experience, several devices don't display the emoji as a correct icon (instead show the rectangle "tofu"), but they still work with it.

Source: am using an emoji with some normal characters on SSID

That's good! That's best case scenario, honestly. With how awful printers are, I wouldn't be surprised if some just crashed.

That'll make setting up your wifi from the command line all kinds of fun.
Even my SSID with , and : in it stumps the Debian installer.

why tf would a printer need internet access, ever?

You do know printers can receive jobs wirelessly right?

just plug the printer into your router or something like raspberry pi (or a pc that's running constantly) with a usb cable if you need that

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Internet access? Never. LAN access though is a different story altogether...

It is very useful for your printer to have LAN access so you can print jobs wirelessly from your laptop.

But printer was just an example of a low-tech device. It could have easily been your Nintendo 3DS that might implode if your SSID had an emoji in it.

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I would recommend generating your passwords and storing them in a local password manager like KeePassXC. This way, you only need to remember one password from the database itself and you will not worry if any website leaks its database since all your passwords are unique.

this is useless unless you can copy/paste or autofill your passwords

You're not using a password manager?

don't you ever need access to one of your accounts from a machine other than what you have in your pocket?

Using Keepass and a USB, this has never been a problem for me.

i prefer carrying an efficient password in my mind rather than carrying a usb full of emoji passwords

but then each to their own

An "efficient password" you can remember is probably a bad password

not necessarily 👈 And you very well know that

work on your memory

So your memory is better than a computer? XD

can you please read what i wrote again? I'm sure i didn't write what you did read.

You said the password in your brain is secure. Thats false.

do you know my password? no.

you assume that it's not secure. You are false. You are writing about something you don't know and you insist!

There are people who can memorize many tens of thousands of decimals. Don't worry, passwords i need to be safe are safe in my mind. What a dickhead you are!

Someone has been playing too much of the password game.

Yes, you can use emoji, but wouldn't it be better to use special characters instead? At least is 100% sure to be supported in all modern devices.

Hah! Lots of (shitty) sites don't allow some "special" characters, like '. That's usually a sign that they're storing passwords insecurely, and it's always a sign that they're not following current security best practices (composition rules reduce security).

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If you make it a policy for your corp. You will screw anyone with visual impairment.

We are totally unable to see the detail in these shitty little pics. So would be unable to use them as a password.

Fine if uou want to use them. And software should start supporting it. But please dont push corps to screw over disabled. Its hard enough dealing with them already. Nearly every big company forgets vision or hearing impairment when trying to manage customers and staff.

I don't think anyone takes this seriously. It's just fun to come up with the worst password policies.

Just imagine the error: "Sorry, your password could not be set. If you decide to include more than one animal, make sure they get along or include a zookeeper as well."

Fucking brilliant.

Afaik, emoticons...er....sorry, emojis are (mostly) dictionary words. And using most (if not all) as passwords is a one-way ticket to "wtf happened to my work PC and why my boss wants to kill me"-land.

Edit: I thought this was an obvious enough joke towards your obvious enough joke -- just "outjoking" your joke. :^)

Emojis are interpreted and stored as Unicode codes like U+1F6D2. Sometimes you might be able to do something like :bed: but those are more for human convenience and up to the individual application to handle or not, when it gets stored it'll be converted to its corresponding Unicode

A series of emojis, once made into their Unicode would actually serve as a fairly decent password, if it's of sufficient length.

The irony is if it was actually stored as dictionary words it would actually end up being a very secure password, see XKCD 936