Chris May

Robert Hensing's blog post discusses the case for using pass phrases in leu of passWORDS.

Very interesting. There were some comments about how passphrases could be easily cracked, if you used all common words or a common phrase. I think salting your passphrase would eliminate this.

What I mean is "one small step for man" would be easy to crack, but "one small step for man!@#$" would not be easy.

I wrote Robert about this and he replied:
Oh I absolutely understand what you're talking about - I thought I had addressed this in my blog - maybe it was in subsequent posts or discussion - it was a while ago.

The net net is that the general consensus is that if everyone starts doing this we will of course see pass-phrase cracking tools pop-up that know about the English language and it will be optimized to try only certain word combinations which actually make sense and have a list of popular / common phrases.

To counter this - you are absolutely right - your 'salt' would probably work fine and force the cracker to go into hybrid mode (try each phrase / sentence with a small brute-force attack of characters on the end to catch people who just do !@#$ at the end etc.).

That's where punctuation, mis-spelling, and slang all come in handy. :) In the south we say 'ya'll' a lot - use that. Etc.