Passwords

Boing-boing had an interesting article on passwords: Top 500 worst passwords
As I recycle it from them, they recycled it from a website that has recycled it again from a book “Perfect Passwords: Selection, Protection, Authentication” by Mark Burnett; I’m sure just to have you clicking the link to Amazon to make money. So there is a lot of pushing second hand information around the internet. The website has been down due to incoming traffic, but this mirror of the site had the original list, which I will publish (in fact: copy & paste) here:

Of course, as an internet addict, I have many passwords to handle, and, still being human, my memory is fallible. So I felt the need to develop an algorithm to generate original passwords that I was able to remember very early in the history of the internet. I will not reveal my secret, but there is also another very interesting algorithm, almost similar to mine, that was published at A Clean Design.

Another possibility is to use a password manager, e.g Keepass, that is free and also runs as a portable application. You only need to remember your master password. Or the more web-based PasswordMaker, that generates strong and different passwords for every account, while you need only to remember your master password, the hash system, password length, and list of legal characters.

The bright side of recycling information in the blogosphere is that it generates new comments that are often more useful than the original post; Boing-boing is rather popular, so there are a lot of people who commented on the post.

First of all someone wrote:

This is the third time I’ve seen a link to this list

Yeah, and mine is probably the fourth – and I’m sure not the last. 🙂

But Batu B had an advice:

the best password generator I’ve heard of is the acronym for a simple phrase, which generates nonsense, but is easy to remember. such as
“this password is nonsense but is easy to remember”
provides the password
“tpinbietr”

or this anonymous comment:

I always liked passwords that use phrases you know by heart but aren’t obvious. Even if they see you type bbroygbvgw they aren’t going to be able to remember it long enough to write it down unless they are old electricians.

Another way to do it: pick some song lyrics, throw in a symbol and another string and you have an amazingly secure password: aobtd^egbdf (Hint, the first one is popular queen lyrics, the second you should know, and may actually be too common to use)

and, almost the same,

As a Microsoft security expert once suggested. The best passwords (when the field allows it) are made of a simple and long phrase. It is easy to remember and impossible to guess.

by classic01.

So, maybe I should review my own algorithm and change my old “letmein” into something more advanced.