What primarily limits the effectiveness of brute force attacks?

Brute force attacks involve systematically trying every possible combination of passwords until the correct one is found. The effectiveness of these attacks is primarily limited by the processing power available to the attacker.

When an attacker launches a brute force attack, the time required to test all potential combinations increases exponentially with the length and complexity of the password. If the attacker has limited processing power, the number of guesses they can make per second is constrained, thereby extending the time it takes to potentially crack a password significantly. For example, if a password is long and includes a variety of character types (uppercase and lowercase letters, numbers, and symbols), the total number of combinations grows, making it impractical to try them all without sufficient computational resources.

Although the complexity of a password also impacts the duration and feasibility of a brute force attack, the critical factor is the attacker's ability to compute guesses efficiently. Processing power directly determines how quickly an attacker can iterate through multiple password combinations.