This is our Friday rubric: every week a new Science Page from the Bob Morrison’s Swine Health Monitoring Project.
Last week, we explained why we took the decision to change the name of the project to honor Bob and his dedication to the swine industry. The project continues, carrying his legacy.
Key points from this week edition:
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Computer processing power keeps increasing at an alarming rate, allowing hackers to greatly increase their password cracking capabilities.
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Hackers’ password cracking tools can crack weak passwords in no more than a couple of hours of execution. The same tools will take millions of years to crack a strong password.
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Whenever password cracking is mentioned in this article, it should be assumed that the password is encrypted using a strong cryptographic hash algorithm such as scrypt: http://www.tarsnap.com/scrypt.html