Math concepts for cybersecurity: integer partitions

Photo by Igal Ness on Unsplash

Cybersecurity experts advise us to have distinct, strong passwords for each device, website, app, etc. It makes sense: if one of your passwords is compromised, your other passwords are still safe.

For example, suppose that one of your social media passwords is cracked and the hacker tries to use that same password for your online banking.

But fortunately, you use a very different password for online banking. Thus the hacker will have used up one attempt on an invalid password that’s not even close to your actual online banking password.

Maybe you have one password for your computer’s operating system, another one for your e-mail, another one for your social media… it adds up to a lot of passwords to remember.

Do we really need a strong and distinct password for some website we might only use once or twice? Like, for example, a website for an annual conference that you might not even attend next year.

And yet some of those websites demand a password with not just uppercase and lowercase letters and digits, but also at least one special character, like a pound sign or an exclamation mark.

So more and more of us rely on password generators, like the ones in Microsoft Edge or Mozilla Firefox. The password generator can come up with a…