Passwords are the necessary evil of modern day computing. Just try and think how many passwords your have; Hotmail, Facebook, Amazon, Blackberry PIN, ATM PIN… the list goes on and on. 

Our online worlds would cease to function if Firefox or Keychain or whatever windows uses forgot all our passwords. Thats why so many people use the same password, for everything! And online bad guys know this, once they’ve hod-winked you into handing over your Hotmail password they can get into your Amazon, your Facebook gathering mothers maiden names, pet names, towns and cities of birth. All the info they need to steal your identity. 

Luckily the banks are hip to this and don’t let you choose your own password, a series of codes, tests and randomly generated numbers are required to log in. But this is all rendered useless if the thief walks into your local branch armed with a copy of your birth certificate and 3 months of utility bills.

What’s wrong with my password you ask? Well as my Mum recently discovered using a dictionary word for her Hotmail, it was just a matter of time. And a random string of letters isn’t much good either, with networks and processors getting fast enough to make brute force attacks feasible.

Lets do some Maths! Take your normal 8 letter password, all in lower case and no numbers that gives:

n(r) = 26(8) = 208,827,064,576

Now if we add in upper case:

52(8) = 53,459,728,531,456

And now the gold standard, numbers and punctuation , . – _ ( ) [ ] \ / ? < > ! @ $ % ^ & * an extra 20 possible characters:

(52 + 10 + 20)(8) = 2,044,140,858,654,980

Now this is getting close, even Roadrunner would have trouble cracking this, but it’s still not enough. It wont be long before we have this type of processing power on our desks and on our laps and eventually in our pockets, so we better come up with a solution.

The Dynamic password, a cypher with an algorithmic portion.

The user would pick a the normal password, mixed case, numbers etc. but also a function, these functions would take values such as, time, date, weekday etc and produce an output that would be appended or prepended to the password. This would make passwords only valid for a few hours or days at most. And vastly decrease the odds of a brute force attack.

Examples

<Cypher><Yesterday’s date * your birthday> 

<Tomorrows Date><Cypher><The hour * today’s date + 1)

This ‘new’ passwords have the advantage of automatically changing every day, week, hour or even minute. This means if a hacker does crack your password, it’s no good in 60 seconds. Or if it only changes every day, he’d have to have a computer fast enough to check all possibilities in 24 hours other wise start again.

Don’t forget to express yourself in the comments.

This was going to be a Twitter tweet, but I decided I wanted your suggestions too, enjoy. Remember to add your suggestions to the comments.

1. Obama’s face on Mt. Rushmore – I also hope he does what we hope he will, and earns that place.

2. Phoenix Lander brought home and displayed in a museum.

3. One more funny Steve Martin film. Just one! Or some new stand-up.

4. Proof of the Higgs-Boson or proof it doesn’t exist.

5. Affordable electric cars.

6. Cold Fusion.

7. Cut and Paste in the iPhone.

8. Rupert Murdoch bankrupt. 

9. Ubuntu in state schools.

10. A Kids In The Hall reunion tour.

11. Charlie Brooker controller of the BBC.

Don’t forget to add your suggestions in the comments.

THIS POST HAS BEEN SUPERSEDED BY Twitter + Growl = Trowel v1.0

OK, so I’m new to Twitter. I didn’t (don’t) get it. Who wants to know what I’m doing? Well as I keep telling myself thats not the point. The point is to spread information, I had a lot of fun on Election night tweeting away about the coverage and calling states (I was surprisingly accurate).

The one thing that did annoy me was it added another website to check – not just a lunch but a refresh every 5 minutes. Something had to be done.

For anyone who has Adium installed on their Mac, you will be aware of Growl it’s a notification system that has yet to reach it’s full potential. As with background messages I wanted my incoming Tweets to be shown in small unobtrusive transparent bubble.

To cut a long story short – I couldn’t find anything. I found a few Ruby scripts (that didn’t work), I tried some nice applications but I didn’t want to run another app I wanted Growl!

So an hour or 2 or Googling and research for scripts I found some Perl modules that I could combine to produce the desired output.

My steps and code are listed below, its not 100% fool proof – please leave comments on how I can improve it.

1. Installing the Modules

You will need only 3 modules Mac::Growl, Net::Twitter and Date::Format, if your lucky Date::Format might even be already installed. Type the following commands into terminal.

$ sudo perl -MCPAN -e shell

This will launch a CPAN command line session to install the modules type (at the prompt):

> install Mac::Growl

Agree to any dependancies, when it done type:

> install Net::Twitter

Again agree to all dependancies, and lastly:

> install Date::Format

> exit

If you had any problems it may be because You need Apple’s Development tools installed, these are a free download form Apple. Please leave any problems in the comments.

2. Coding

Now for the code, just copy the following into a empty text file and save as some thing sensible like growl_tweet.pl:

#! /usr/bin/perl -wT

use Mac::Growl ':all';
use Net::Twitter;
use Date::Format;

my $app    = 'Growl/Twitter';
my @names  = ('New Tweet');

RegisterNotifications($app, \@names, [$names[0]]);

my $tweet = Net::Twitter->new( username=>'##REPLACE WITH USERNAME##', password=>'##REPLACE WITH PASSWORD##' );

my $last_id = undef;
my $switch = 0;

while(1)
{
 my @tt = ();

 if($last_id)
 {
 @tt = $tweet->friends_timeline({count => 200, since_id => $last_id });
 }
 else
 {
 @tt = $tweet->friends_timeline({count => 5 });
 }

 foreach my $t (@{$tt[0]})
 {
 if(!$switch) { $last_id = $t->{id}; $switch++; };

 PostNotification($app, $names[0], $t->{user}{screen_name}, $t->{text});

 printf("%s: %s\n", $t->{user}{screen_name}, $t->{text});

 print "sleep 4\n";

 sleep(4);
 }

 $switch = 0;

 print "sleep 37\n";
 sleep(37);
}

exit;

3. Running

Now, simply run the script:

$ perl ./growl_tweet.pl

And bingo! All your tweets appear! Leave a comment if it works and especially if it doesn’t – if there is enough interest I might consider adding features and real installer!

4. Here’s one I made earlier

If you would like the code, you can down load it here (with out any formatting issues).

http://www.echo-technology.co.uk/development/twitter+growl/growl.pl.txt