How do you choose a password?

Question

Do you have a system for choosing passwords that you'll remember? I always seem to choose passwords that I instantly forget...

Answer 1

Pick the name of a relative like a cousin, names are harder to guess if people don't specifically know your whole family. If that isn't secure enough then add the month or day e.g. 23 you were born on the end. Don't do the year though as people could easily guess this.

Answer 2

Technically: All passwords should be at least a combination of alpha characters and numbers, however it is now being recomended people use "Special Characters" as well (i.e. ^ & and others).

As to how I remember my passwords, I usually choose a word of which would only have meaning to me and then substitute numbers for some of the letters. This gives me the ability to remember the word and if for any reason I forget the exact way I typed it, all I have to do is figure out what numbers I substituted for what alpha characters. Another thing I sometimes do is use "Old English" spellings of the words, which believe it or not does make it harder for people to figure out what my pasword is.

Answer 3

I believe in secure passwords. Mine are typically hard to type in, If your password is systematic it's easy to guess.

General I mix uppercase/lowercase/symbols/numbers and special characters not seen on the keyboard. such as: ╙

You can pick words from hobbies: for example: if you like Horses, you can use words like bridle, cinch, or stirrup.
Have a fancy to study french? look these words up in french and use the french version mixed with the english version.
Pick a date like when you bought your first saddle. Instead of the month use the symbols: June, which is 06 becomes )^

If you keep the passwords fun, you'll remember them - educate yourself and know how to get your password if you forgot it.

Good luck.

Remember passwords are easy to hack if you know what you are doing. Mixing the above combinations will make it more difficult.

Any questions, I'm just an email away.

Answer 4

Choosing a password is not hard, but making it secure takes a bit of effort.

Be careful not to choose a password which can be guessed. Your middle name, a pet's name, or a mother's maiden name can all be researched or easily "Socially Engineered" out of you by the right person. Never use a word which can be socially tied to you. Not a family name, cousin's name, pet's name, street name, high school name, mascot name. NOTHING which can be tied to you regardless of how much you want to use it beucase it's easy to remember. Passwords should always be chosen at RANDOM.

How you use a password is what makes it secure. Choosing a different password for everything can be confusing and cause you to want to place all your passwords in a single file on your computer. Don't. This again is easy to find by the wrong people.

What you can do to alleviate the problem is to choose a series of passwords and then manipulate them to make the more secure. First, decide the security level of the program or item in question. Email, bank sites, and sites which carry a bank card such as Paypal and Ebay should all carry the highest level of security possible and they should NEVER share a password. This is why you need a series which you use and rotate as needed.

As an example, let's choose a password at random to start. The password: "notepad" will help us for a bit. Notepad is common enough and the average person wouldn't guess this as your password. Good. That makes it step one secure. You can secure it even more by including a random number in it. (Again, nothign which can be guessed like the year you graduated, your birthdate or a special day...make it RANDOM) So for our example, the password now becomes 'notepad3', "note43pad' or 'notepad43'. This is a much higher level of security. The highest level comes in obscuring your password and making it double hard to figure out. I can make 'notepad43' even more secure by changing the letters to numbers. "notepad' becomes "n0t3p4d".

Highly sensitive sites/programs deserve their own password over and above any other key or password. (Your online banking password should NOT be the same as your Debit card PIN number) As you add other sites, y ou can double up on the passwords for sites which have no real security need for thier own separate password.

Once you create a series of 3-4 passwords for these other sites, you can easily rotate them and add numbers as needed when the password needs to be changed. By creating a system in your mind, you can thereby more easily remember the passwords and the corresponding numbers without having to write them down.

Answer 5

I use a few different passwords.

For general sites where security isn't an issue I use the password that was automatically installed with my first ISP provider.

For other sites where security is somewhat important, but where I don't have any credit info, I use one of my pet's names with a random number.

And the importany password consists of my brothers football number, a portion of my old phone number and my dads middle name.

Answer 6

When is comes to balancing security with convenience, a few things have to be considered.

1.) Psychological/Mnemonic security: IE - respectively, how easy is it for someone to guess the password and how easy is it for someone to remember the password.

2.) Cryptographic security: IE - how long would it take, best case situation, for a computer to try every possible password until a match is found.

There are many factors to both equations that are dictated by technology and by human nature, but being aware of these factors can add to security by simply taking them into account.

So, how to come up with a secure password.... The idea is to come up with something that is easily remembered, yet hard for anyone else to guess based on knowing you personally and hard for a computer to guess due to mathematical complexity.

How to solve the human factors:

1.) Rely on process rather than facts - don't use birth dates and other significant numbers or letters that are obtainable by other people - social security numbers, birth dates and anniversaries, names of kids, etc.,... Rather rely of a formula that incorporates a random number of these things.

In this example the security relies on knowledge of the formula rather than on concrete facts knowable by a large number of people.

2.) Cryptographic security: This is today the more likely attack so it needs to be considered as such. Cryptographic security is all about complexity. The goal here is to use a large character set for each character in the password and to maximize the number of digits.

Example: A 2 character numeric password has 10^2 or 100 possibilities. An 8 character, alpha numeric, case sensitive password has (26+26+10)^8 or 218340105584896 possibilities.

The idea is to force a computer to check everyone of the possibilities where they more there are, the longer it would take.

Example - first letter of mother's maiden name+month of birth date+(12-birth month)+whatever.

The formula for cryptographic complexity is basically (number of possible characters per character to the power of the number of characters)

Thus, a 2 digit password using only numbers is 10^2=100
a 3 character password using only numbers is 10^3=1000
A 2 character password using only lower case letters is 26^2=676
A 3 character password using only lower case letters is 26^3=17576

And on and on. SO if you have a high character set - say numbers, lower case letters, upper case letters and basic symbols (^&#)(,."' ect.,.... you will add to password complexity.

A password using all of these types of characters produces a complexity differing only on length.

26 (lower case letters)
26 (upper case letters)
10 (numbers)
32 (basic, keyboard printable symbols)

That's 26+26+10+36=98 possibilities for each character in the password.

Take that to the power of the length of the password and an 8 character password has 98^8=8,507,630,225,817,856 possible combinations. Add ONE more character and the password complexity is increased to 98^9=833,747,762,130,149,888 or a factor of 98 times. That's No trivial task for a computer, but pretty easy to come up with a formula to produce that complexity for a human being. How hard it is to include a symbol, number, upper and lower case letter?


What you are really looking for is a password that is both psychologically AND cryptographically secure - as much as possible within reason.

A good formula I've used is literally to open notepad and type random crap. I end up with things like aAs32l8&*. This password is both psychologically (has no attachment to me personally or to my though process) and cryptographically (length and character set are all used to the fullest extent) so its a secure password.

Now the question is remembering the password. If you have to type it in all the time, it will become nothing more than a bunch of keystrokes. If you are able to write it down, then as long as you keep that written note secure (ie - you don't put it on a sticky note under your keyboard or worse yet stick it to the side of your monitor) you are probably fine.

The idea is to come up with a process that you can use to derive passwords that are secure. Don't remember the password itself, rather, remember the formula you use to create passwords. As long as that formula is secure in the passwords it creates, you have security in that nobody else knows the formula, even if they did they don't know the variables you are plugging into the formula and they don't know the last time you changed the password - which may or may not have been the basis for the new password.

Last thing - since the computer is the most likely vector for attack, if you keep your passwords in a plain text notepad .txt file, you have already lost. Better to jot it down on a piece of paper in that case as an attack over the network cannot read your sticky note, but another computer CAN read your plain text file.

Answer 7

I always think of something that only i know, and no one else. Pet names, names, cars ext.. people that know you would know and could guess.. so think of something off the wall you did by your self or something.. like if i went to paris and no one knew.. i would use something along those lines.. but include numbers and capital letters,.. this makes it harder for somone to guess.. if they guess paris.. but its really pAris2 then guess what.. they might know the ancwer but not the password..

Answer 8

keep it ultra secret that u use all the time and keep all you paswords as one ... tho sometime u'll need to cchange it like add a 1 or a number on the end

but soon you'll be so used to your password taht u'll type it without needing to look at it and onone will be albe to guess it cos you'll type it too fast

Answer 9

Just think of something like your favourite place or your nick name .Or just a funny name that you will remember

Answer 10

Carefully.

Choose one that is only known to you and not something, or some word or phrase, you use all the time.

Perhaps your mother's middle name or maiden name if it is very unusual.