Padding Passwords For Security

Common attacks on passwords involve bruteforcing and using pre-computed ‘rainbow tables’. Avoiding both of these attacks is fairly trivial – for both it’s a matter of length and an uncommon password. The issue is that remembering many different long passwords is difficult, which is where password padding comes in.

Password padding just means that you take your password and add one or two characters repeatedly. For example:

Password: Ninja

Padded Password: !!!Ninja!!!

Ninja is an incredibly common password, a dictionary attack will probably try it immediately. You’d be cracked in seconds. By adding !!! to both ends we’ve made a dictionary attack less likely, bruteforcing will take significantly longer, precomputed hashes are less likely to work, and it’s as easy to remember as Ninja.

Of course !!!Ninja!!! is still not a very secure password. While that padding is great for avoiding attacks it would still be susceptible to dictionary attacks if they decide to bruteforce the padding.  But attackers don’t get points for “close” – they can be one character away or a million and have no idea which.

Take any of your passwords and consider putting some padding on them. It’s a very simple way to improve password security without having to resort to memorizing incredibly long passwords.