Worm/Passwords

[Doug Gwyn]

In article <220 at twwells.uucp> bill at twwells.UUCP (T. William Wells) writes:
>	... lassword ...

Oh, but I can't let you have the lassword!

>As you can see, many of these would make easily pronounceable passwords.
>
>Using a better database might create more or better passwords.  And
>each user could have his own database; this makes knowledge of the
>travesty algorithm useless for guessing someone's password.

I didn't mean to imply that this approach wasn't viable, but I
couldn't resist the experiment and thought (since the posted travesty
program wasn't runnable on anything except MS-DOS) that an illustration
of what "travesty" produces might be informative to many readers.

Indeed, use of samples of a natural language itself as a database
for producing statistically similar "random" text is a good idea.
I seem to recall one of the Computer Recreations columns in
Scientific American a couple of years ago exploring this method.

Certainly a larger, more varied database would have produce a better
selection of lasswords.