Chinese vs English Language Password Security

Fascinating that language could strongly  change the ability to crack passwords.  Note also the Markov solving engine used in the test.

How Language Shapes Password Security
IEEE Spectrum   By Jeremy Hsu

Researchers at China's Peking University and the University of Virginia compared Chinese and English passwords, analyzing 106 million passwords from nine Web services, including 73 million from six Chinese-language services and 33 million from three English-language services. The team learned a supposedly strong password based on English-language precepts could actually be weak and easily guessed from a Chinese-language perspective. A key distinction is that many Chinese-language users prefer passwords composed entirely of numbers, and more often use mobile phone numbers or certain dates in passwords than English users. The researchers attempted to decrypt the passwords with the Markov-Chain algorithm, which assigns certain likelihoods to characters based on their interrelationships, and the probabilistic context-free grammars (PCFG) algorithm, which parses passwords into letter segments, digit segments, and symbol segments before guessing in order of the most probable combinations. ... "