Chapter 5 of 14

How long should it be?

Length vs cracking time — exactly how many characters you need.

WPA2/WPA3 accepts 8–63 ASCII characters. The math is unforgiving: every character you add roughly multiplies cracking time by the size of the character pool. A modern attacker with a single rented GPU cluster can try tens of billions of WPA2 guesses per second.

8 charsHours
12 charsMonths
16 charsCenturies
20+ charsEffectively forever

Estimates assume a fully random ASCII password and a single high-end GPU cluster. Real-world attackers go faster on weak passwords and slower on truly random ones.

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