{"id":2703,"date":"2010-01-23T01:33:21","date_gmt":"2010-01-23T05:33:21","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/?p=2703"},"modified":"2010-01-23T01:33:21","modified_gmt":"2010-01-23T05:33:21","slug":"passwords-2","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/2010\/01\/23\/passwords-2\/","title":{"rendered":"Passwords"},"content":{"rendered":"

I saw an interesting idea recently. It was attributed to Bruce Schneier<\/a>, though I can’t substantiate that.<\/p>\n

In general, people find it easiest to remember words, so most people’s password<\/strong> is essentially a word. This is bad, of course, since it’s easy for a computer to run through every word in the English language in a very short time. So it’s common to take a word and “mangle” it in some ways: password might become p@ssw0rd, which, while better than “password,” is not exactly hard to guess.<\/p>\n

The idea I saw proposed, though, was to start with a sentence, and do something like take the first letter of each word. And if you’re good, you can work symbols into it. It’s not the most interesting example, but take a sentence like “He went to Stop & Shop and bought 4 loaves of bread!” and then take the first letter of each word, take some slight liberties, and you get “Hw2S&S&b4lob!” It’s a thirteen-character password employing mixed-case characters, several numbers, and several symbols. It’s nearly impossible to remember, but you don’t have to remember it directly. You remember “He went to Stop & Shop and bought 4 loaves of bread!” and you can figure it out. (And once you start typing it with regularity, it’ll become easy.)<\/p>\n

Of course, you want to have the end product in mind, so choosing a long sentence that lends itself to special characters is fun. (“I met the #1 basketball star today at 4 o’clock!!” could be “Imt#1bb*2day@4o’c!!” which is superb, albeit a dumb sentence.)<\/p>\n

Of course, the “rule” is just a starting point. It’s an excellent idea to deviate as you see fit.<\/p>","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

I saw an interesting idea recently. It was attributed to Bruce Schneier, though I can’t substantiate that. In general, people find it easiest to remember words, so most people’s password is essentially a word. This is bad, of course, since … Continue reading →<\/span><\/a><\/p>","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-2703","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2703","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=2703"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/2703\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=2703"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=2703"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/blogs.n1zyy.com\/n1zyy\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=2703"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}