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I still don't see how that's an issue, yes a password using a series of ridiculously complicated family emoji will be truncated but the actual bytes still provide entropy, just because the data doesn't use pixels when rendered doesn't mean it doesn't increase the search space


If your password is comprised of three emojis that each take up 24 bytes, then yes, a 72 byte truncation dramatically reduces the search space for a brute force against these hypothetical 24-byte-emoji-only passwords.

There are far fewer possible combinations of any three emojis than there are any 72 ASCII characters.

This is x^3 vs y^72, where X is the total number of distinct emojs and Y is the total number of distinct ASCII characters.

24 bytes of data is not 24 bytes of entropy if there are only a couple thousand different possible inputs to produce all of the possible 24 byte sequences produced by those inputs.

For simplicity: picture having only two possible input buttons. Each one produces 1000 bytes of random-looking data, but each one always produces the exact same 1000-byte sequence, respectively. You have a maximum password of 1 button press. The "password" may contain 1000 bytes, but you only have one bit of entropy, because the attacker doesn't need to correctly guess all 1000 bytes, they only need to correctly guess which of the two buttons you pressed.

Of course, in practice, not all emojis are 24 bytes, and I'd assume few people are using emoji-only passwords, but the distinction between bytes of data and bytes of entropy is worth clarifying, regardless.


I would argue that a password containing emojis is unlikely to ever be cracked, because no attacker is going to test emojis unless they have some reason to believe you use them in your password.


Attackers don't come up with every entry on the wordlist they throw into hashcat themselves. The attacker's imagination has essentially zero correlation with the contents of their wordlist.


Okay. How many major wordlists include emojis?

Maybe...like...a dozen entries at most across all of them?


Rest assured, the world's intelligence agencies and cybercrime rings aren't just taking vanilla open source wordlists off github and hoping they get lucky.

You don't know what your adversary's wordlist contains, and assuming you do is a recipe for overconfidence.


Yes, "if your enemy is state sponsored attackers" you shouldn't do many things, like use bcrypt incorrectly, or really passwords almost at all. That's obviously not what I'm saying.


Okay, use emojis in every password, you win, you're right, emojis make your password hack-proof to everyone who isn't the NSA.


That is also not what I said either, but I admire your dedication to engaging in bad faith.




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