this post was submitted on 05 Jan 2024
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I’ll bite. Serious answer.
If your password is required to only be a number, it has the smallest “girth” possible at only 10 possibilities for a length of one.
If your password is required to only be a letter, it has more “girth” at only 26 possibilities for a length of one.
If your password is required to only be a symbol, it’s probably about the same “girth” as letters.
You could make the girth increase on your one-character password by requiring it to be any of those above, but that’s still just about 60 options.
But length increases the security of a password exponentially. So if your password is required to be two numbers, you’re already of 100 options. Require only one more digit, and you’re at 1000, even with only ten choices per digit.
So girth is far less important than length when it comes to passwords.
Exactly what I was thinking. Girth is just the number of possible characters. A very crude measure of password strength could thus be length x girth.