How to choose the password that noone can guess and you cant remember Of course you know what the good password should be – random letters including capitals, peppered with numbers and enhanced with printable control characters.
The only small but important detail these recommendations seem to forget is that there are may be few hundreds in the world that can memorize such incomprehensible sequence of chars. So if someone does decide to follow it such passwords end up being written on the paper and stuck to the monitor (on its back).
I never followed such recommendations but nevertheless found the way to come up with hard to break passwords. Here it is – I just take easily memorizeable sentence from some verse/prose , take first letters of each word, capitalize first letter and then add some predefined number that doesn’t chnage from password to password .Example follows.
This is how the 1st sentence from e.e. cummings turns into password:
Anyone lived in a pretty how town -> Aliapht7722
As I said previously these are passwords I use also for SSH user access and for the last year brute force efforts went down the drains (so far).
The topic of passwords is actually a big one , and more of human psychology kind rather than crypto-randomness sort of things.
For more about that look for example here:
www.schneier.com
Another way to come up with random but easy to pronounce words for passwords can be done with scientific approach:
www.multicians.org
How to choose the password that noone can guess and you cant remember
Posted in Linux.
– June 9, 2010
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