The best way to do passwords
February 14th 2008
Passwords are a pain.
I’ve spoken at length about this in my book Authentication and in my web site on Password Sanity. It’s best summed up in an old Dilbert cartoon that I licensed for the book and web site. The terrifying thing is that Mordac’s crazy ideas are typical for password policy these days.
People sometimes ask me about good ways of creating strong, memorable passwords. My favorite approach, described in my book Authentication, is to pick two large-ish words and punctuate them with a digit or special character. An arguably better way is to pick three shorter words and separate each with a digit or punctuation.
A friend recently described a password selection tool he uses at work: the tool presents three (hopefully) random lists of words. You choose your password by picking one from each column. The password consists of the three words separated by periods. If you don’t like the words in the lists, you push a button and the selector generates three more lists. Continue Reading »