If you were given a list a human generated passwords and computer generated passwords, you could spot the difference immediately. Passwords are not random, and crackers take this into account. Most passwords are letters with a stray symbol here and there. More advanced password crackers take a dictionary of base words and use Markov chains of passwords to try.
This greatly reduces the search space and the eon-long searches start looking more in reach.
That's true - human chosen passwords are vulnerable to more clever non-brute-force attacks. This effect is rather different than the interplay between computer power and hashing schemes though. (Thus my strong qualifications about fully-random :)
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If you were given a list a human generated passwords and computer generated passwords, you could spot the difference immediately. Passwords are not random, and crackers take this into account. Most passwords are letters with a stray symbol here and there. More advanced password crackers take a dictionary of base words and use Markov chains of passwords to try.
This greatly reduces the search space and the eon-long searches start looking more in reach.
That's true - human chosen passwords are vulnerable to more clever non-brute-force attacks. This effect is rather different than the interplay between computer power and hashing schemes though. (Thus my strong qualifications about fully-random :)