Password Vault Cracking

For over 10 years now, an interesting cycle has begun to emerge with regard to the protection of secrets such as passwords. At first, for reasons we have discussed elsewhere in this book, many users would often resort to selecting the same (often weak) password for many sites and services. As data breaches became more and more common, the industry realized that we needed to focus on users selecting unique passwords per site or computer. However, the same password requirements that make a user’s password difficult to remember continued to complicate this objective. This is where the password manager comes in.

What if we could offer someone a digital book that could safely store their secrets, and even help them choose good passwords? However, there was still one problem – how did we keep the book safe from others who might want to view those secrets? Password managers secured the book with a key that only the user knew. One passphrase, often...