Elizabeth Barrette (ysabetwordsmith) wrote,
Elizabeth Barrette
ysabetwordsmith
  • Mood: busy

Passwords

This article talks about password security.

Sigh.  Most things online don't really need passwords, it's just a blighted nuisance that's going to lock people out of sites when they lose the stupid password and the recovery routine fails.  For ordinary purposes, where you wouldn't bother locking the site if it wasn't required, a handful of easy-to-remember passwords will do fine.

For anything truly sensitive: don't even use an English word.  A foreign word in an obscure language is more secure.  For maximum security, use a random string of whatever letters/numbers/symbols the system will allow.  Nothing is unhackable but you can make it so inconvenient that only a maximum-strength program that tests ALL combinations will guess the password.
Tags: cyberspace theory, networking, reading
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  • 5 comments
yotogi

It's not that much more secure, honestly.

yotogi

August 23 2012, 12:52:53 UTC 8 years ago Edited:  August 23 2012, 12:53:59 UTC

"Maximum strength" is a rapidly lowering ceiling. You may find this interesting, or possibly depressing.

As the article shows, those boxes are pretty much built of off the shelf parts... and the speed is only going to increase.
msstacy13

msstacy13

August 23 2012, 15:02:57 UTC 8 years ago

I would add that you should use different passwords everywhere.
No small number of sites exist primarily to garner passwords.
ysabetwordsmith

Well...

ysabetwordsmith

August 23 2012, 18:10:12 UTC 8 years ago

If you have the memory for that, sure. Most people don't. So they have a choice between a less-secure password option they can actually use, or a more-secure one that locks them out too. This is why so many people use less-secure options: it's preferable to being unable to access things.
yotogi

Re: Well...

yotogi

August 23 2012, 20:42:29 UTC 8 years ago

For this particular problem, Keepass has you covered.
laylalawlor

laylalawlor

August 23 2012, 16:21:27 UTC 8 years ago

Passwords are like locks on doors -- they're not hard to circumvent (*I* know how to open a common door lock with a credit card, not that I would ever do it except on my own front door) but it sets the bar somewhat higher than leaving everything unlocked.

One thing I did not know until recently is that really long passwords (say, 20 characters) are about as close to uncrackable as you can get; even if it's a sentence composed largely of common English words, as long as there's at least something hard to guess in there (say, a foreign word, or the name of a character that doesn't exist anywhere outside your head), the amount of time for even a good brute-force program to crack it is astronomical. Easy for a human to remember and type, but extremely difficult for a computer to crack.

The other thing I realized recently is that there is absolutely no reason not to write your passwords down on a piece of paper. There are circumstances in which this might not be a good idea (like, say, attaching a piece of paper with all your passwords to a shared work computer) but generally speaking, a little notebook that you keep in your house to write down all your passwords will never be associated with your computer by anyone but you. Especially if it doesn't say PASSWORDS on the cover. *g*