Cybersecurity - Memes

Even if you just tried word combinations of the 1000 most common English words (which for the record, none of those four belong to), you'd have a trillion possible combinations. If you try all the one-, two- and three-word-combinations first because you don't know how many words it's gonna be, you're about a billion guesses in before you even get to the actual solution space. If I mix in words from other languages, or less common words, the combinatorics get even worse, even if you knew what to try in the first place.

According to a word list generated from OpenSubtitles in 2018, staple would be #18878, so you'd have to use something on the size order of the top 20k, which would be an upper boundary of 160 quadrillion, not counting trying less than four words. I don't know what the best order for trying the words would be or how to calculate the rank of that combination within that order, but I'm pretty sure that "a fucking long time" is the most apt descriptor of how long it'd take.

By comparison, the 44 bit entropy the comic mentions is "just" 17 Trillion combinations for an upper boundary, or 2048^4. I'd venture a guess and say that that's far below the lower boundary for the other option.