Gavin Andresen - 2012-08-22 21:53:44

RE: seeds with a lot of entropy:

Every time I look at the academic literature on passwords/passphrases, I get more depressed about the feasibility of either giving users a secure passphrase that they will remember or getting a secure passphrase from them. I fear there will be a lot of lost coins if "brain wallets" get popular.

E.g. this 2012 paper: http://dl.acm.org/citation.cfm?doid=2335356.2335366
Quote
Users tend to create passwords that are easy to guess, while system assigned passwords tend to be hard to remember. Passphrases, space-delimited sets of natural language words, have been suggested as both secure and usable for decades. In a 1,476-participant online study, we explored the usability of 3- and 4-word system-assigned passphrases in comparison to system-assigned passwords composed of 5 to 6 random characters, and 8-character system assigned pronounceable passwords. Contrary to expectations, system-assigned passphrases performed similarly to system-assigned passwords of similar entropy across the usability metrics we examined. Passphrases and passwords were forgotten at similar rates, led to similar levels of user difficulty and annoyance, and were both written down by a majority of participants. However, passphrases took significantly longer for participants to enter, and appear to require error-correction to counteract entry mistakes. Passphrase usability did not seem to increase when we shrunk the dictionary from which words were chosen, reduced the number of words in a passphrase, or allowed users to change the order of words