Hello! I apologize - but - I am a bit confused. A 63 byte passphrase is not shorter than "256 bits." 63 ASCII characters for the ASCII passphrase can be up to 63 bytes, each byte is 8 bits, 8*63=504. So, 63 bytes (if the largest available length WPA2 passphase is chosen) is 504 bits. Does the protocol truncate the ASCII to byes conversion output? To be shorter than 256 bits, you would need
@@martinkunev It's not 7 bits per character, actually is 8-bits because you have 8 physical states starting by 0 to 7 if you count you have 0, 1, 2, 3, 4, 5, 6, and 7 logical states but those correspond to 8-bits or 8 physical states that you can flip-flop between 0 and 1, so 2^8=256 physical states or 256 bits so you can represet 0 to 255 logical states, that means the ASCII table which contains 256 characteres.
@The Pentest Challenger, first of all, your analysis is partially wrong, the first part related to the conversion in the ASCII passphrase lengh is true 504-bits are greater than 256-bits, but what happened, when he referred to 256 bits he was talking about of the value of each ascii character that is a range from 0 to 255 values that is the extended ascii table, so the protocol do not truncate ascii to bytes in order to encript you must use hex value thats mean each character refers to 16 possible values per position, so then you have shorter position values in order to address properly in the memory, that is the way that looks truncated.
@@jldmvlog No, ASCII is 7 bits with 128 possible states. You can look at the ASCII character table and you'll see there are 128 characters. Years later it became common to have 8-bit bytes so people started encoding ASCII in 8 bits leaving the most significant bit 0. wikipedia: The committee voted to use a seven-bit code to minimize costs associated with data transmission
