On Wed, Jul 23, 2003 at 03:50:22AM -0700, David S. Miller wrote:
>
> > It's much smaller if you didn't know that it was at most 7 characters
> > long. However, if you did know the upper bound, or you were just
> > brute forcing all passwords starting from 1 character, then the
> > difference is relatively minor. This is because
> >
> > n + n^2 + n^3 + n^4 + n^5 + n^6
> >
> > is much smaller than n^7 where n is something like 62 for a reasonable
> > password.
>
> "7" in my example is an arbitrary number, increase it to any larger
> number you like.
Well, as m gets larger, the number
(n + n^2 + ... + n^(m-1)) / n^m
tends to 1 / (n - 1).
In other words, if you can break n^m, then you can probably break
n + n^2 + ... + n^m
Anyway, I'm not that bothered with making /proc/tty/driver root-only,
even if it is only for what seems to me to be dubious reasons.
--
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