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A software developer’s musings on software development

Password tips for non-geeks

Warning: I wrote this blog in 2011. That is a long time ago, especially on the internet. My opinions may have changed since then. Technological progress may have made this information completely obsolete. Proceed with caution.

I’ve been thinking about passwords recently, as I have gone and changed passwords for pretty much every website that I can remember having a password for. For me, this was prompted by the hacking of PlayStation Network, which led to my PSN password being compromised. And, like most people, I used the same password for PSN that I used for many other sites. This is generally a Bad Thing, but what are you going to do?

Well, for geeks, the answer is “have a separate, randomly-generated password for every site, and the password must be long and contain numbers, lowercase letters, uppercase letters, and symbols.”

I realize that this is impractical for normal people.

So here’s my advice for non-geeks. Come up with a sentence. A really random sentence. Try to include some numbers in the sentence. Then take the first letter of each word. This will be your base password. Here, I’ll make up an example:

forget about the last 7 things u Heard 2-day

That gives us: fal7tuH2d

Believe it or not, it’s really easy to remember a sentence like this. You can leave out articles, conjunctions, and/or prepositions if you like, and you can replace “are” with “r”, “you” with “u”, etc. Whatever is most natural for you to remember. Making at least one of the letters uppercase and including some kind of punctuation is good. Make sure there are at least 7 characters, since a lot of sites use 8 characters as the minimum length of a password.

Next, come up with a rule for how you will include the company name in the password. For example, “use the last letter of each word in the company name, and capitalize the last one”. Using this rule, my password for Amazon, PayPal, and Gmail might be as follows:

Amazon: fal7tuH2dN
PayPal: fal7tuH2dyL
Gmail (Google Mail): fal7tuH2deL

Now, if someone somehow obtains your password to one site, they won’t have your password to every site you use. And hopefully they won’t be able to figure out the rule for the last few characters (this is why using something other than the first character of the site name is a good idea). And no one’s ever going to guess a password like that.

Of course, this isn’t fool-proof. But it is a lot more secure than using the same password for every site, and it’s a lot more secure than using a word that can be found in a dictionary or your pet’s name or your birthday or something like that.

Note: If you really want to do it the geeky way (a long, random password for each site), you can get applications that will generate random passwords and store them securely. This makes it so you only need to memorize one password, and that password lets you access all your other passwords. I like KeePass, and it runs without an installer on PC and (I think) Mac. I keep it in my Dropbox so I can use it from home or work. But I don’t do it for every site; mainly, I just do this for really sensitive sites (like bank and credit card websites). And remember, if someone really wants your password, they can probably crack it in a few hours with just five dollars of equipment.