Today I met a customer who said he had a password to crack. It wasn't particularly complicated, just 14 digits. He asked me if he could get it done for 50 yuan. I was shocked when they told me that cracking the 14-digit number was still random. When I heard that, I thought it was an astronomical number and impossible to solve, so they gave me 50 yuan. I didn't even want to run a dictionary. I decisively rejected the order, and the client cursed and said that we were no good and wouldn't write profanity, saying that our competitors had solved all the 18-digit passwords, so I wrote an article about popular science and complaining.
How many 14-digit password combinations are there?
To calculate all possible combinations of a 14-digit password, you first need to clarify the following factors:
Character Set Size: The possible character set of the password (e.g., numbers, lowercase letters, uppercase letters, special characters, etc.).
Below, I will calculate several common character set scenarios:
1. Numbers only (0-9)
The number character set has 10 characters (0 to 9).
The total number of combinations is:
1014=100,000,000,000,00010^{14} = 100,000,000,000,0001014=100,000{
2. Lowercase Letters Only (a-z)
The lowercase letter character set has 26 characters.
The total number of combinations is:
2614≈6.7×101926^{14} \approx 6.7 \times 10^{19}26{}{}14≈6.7×{}{
3. UPPER CAPITAL LETTERS ONLY (A-Z)
The upper case character set has 26 characters.
The total number of combinations is the same as lowercase letters, which is:
2614≈6.7×101926^{14} \approx 6.7 \times 10^{19}2614≈6.7× 0> means approximately 67 trillion possible password combinations.
4. Mixed uppercase and lowercase letters (AZ, AZ)
The character set of mixed uppercase and lowercase letters has 52 characters (26 lowercase letters + 26 uppercase letters).
The total number of combinations is:
5214≈5.9×102352^{14} \approx 5.9 \times 10^{23}5214≈<130x114>≈< That is, about 5900 trillion possible cipher combinations.
5. Numbers + lowercase letters + uppercase letters (0-9, a-z, a-z)
The character set size is 62 characters (10 numbers + 26 lowercase letters + 26 uppercase letters).
The total number of combinations is:
6214≈3.5×102462^{14} \approx 3.5 \times 10^{24}6214≈3.5×<51x50> 0> means approximately 350 trillion possible cipher combinations.
6. Numbers + Uppercase and Lowercase Letters + Special Characters (0-9, AZ, AZ, Special Characters)
Assume that the special character set has 32 commonly used characters (e.g., !@#$%^&*(), etc.), and the total character set size is 94 characters (10 numbers + 26 lowercase letters + 26 uppercase letters + 32 special characters).
The total number of combinations is:
9414≈3.8×102694^{14} \approx 3.8 \times 10^{26}9414≈< That is, approximately 380 trillion trillion possible cipher combinations.
Summary
At our current speed, we won't be able to solve this problem even if the Earth is destroyed! For RAR compressed files, our servers cost hundreds of thousands of devices per second, but the speed is only a little over 1 million per second.
Password Recovery