Re: Safe password?

paul_wary@xxxxxxxxx writes:

> I use an encryption program that uses AES-256 as its encryption
> algorithm but only allows passwords with a maximum length of 16
> characters. Is it possible to create a safe password with only 16
> characters for this encryption type?

You can create passwords that might be sufficiently secure for some
applications, but you cannot exploit the full security of the
algorithm's keyspace, because no 16-character password will provide a
key of 256 bits. Even if you use every bit of every character, that
still comes out to only 128 bits; and in practice there are some
characters you can't use, so the actual effective key length is far
less than the algorithm allows (only 105 bits if you limit your
password to printable characters).

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