Password Recovery Software

English bishop James Langstaff suggests using Bible quotes instead of more conventional, simple passwords. According to The Right Reverend Bishop Langstaff, the Bible may be considered as an eternal source of strong passwords that include upper- and lower-case letters, as well as digits. How is it possible? The bishop suggests picking a favorite biblical quote, taking each word's first letter, and adding the numbers of the chapter and of the verse.

For example, the quote
"Father, into your hands I commit my spirit." Luke Chapter 23 Verse 46.

will become the password
FiyhIcmsL23V46

Actually, the idea of making passwords from phrases is nothing new. This method has been recommending by many security experts to create simple yet strong passwords for quite a long time. Many IT professionals recommend using catchphrases, lyrics, or quotations to derive the strong passwords.

But in fact such combinations, despite their apparent complexity, should be considered as weak as the following simple words: 1234, password, or admingod. That's because they are vulnerable to dictionary-based attacks. So to guess a 'Biblical' password, anyone can use a set of Bible quotes to create a dictionary of verses.

For example, Passcape Software password recovery products support a phrase-based attack. It can be easily adapted to recover passwords proposed by Bishop Langstaff. One by one, the program retrieves lines from a dictionary and generates multiple phrases based on the original one, to be compared with the password. Tens or even hundreds combinations will be derived from the worlds's famous "To be or not to be": with or without spaces, with lower-case or capital letters, with first letters from each word, etc. The password recovery software can even utilize a lot of ready-to-use online phrase wordlists.

Downloading online wordlist for phrase attack.