Tuesday, September 4, 2012

How to create a truely secure password which is easy to remember

As you probably already have seen, there are a million tips for how to create a secure password. 99,9% of them are quite useless because they end in some complicated stringchar-mixups.
What is the most important factor in pw security? LENGTH! (espsecially in regards to BruteForce)
"Hello.........................."  is more secure as  "skfjdf3AKJD/("  - Because its longer!
So a secure password does not have to be some complicated stringchar-mix.

My Recipe: 

Use sentences! Why? Because they are long, they have UPPER- and LOWERCASE and most of them end in a symbol or they contain other symbols. Length should not be under 12 chars!
Example: "IloveDouglasAdamsbecausehe'sfuckingawesome" <-- easy to remember and extremely strong because its 42 chars long!
Cracking that by Brute Force with a 100 Trillion guesses/sec would take:

3.49 billion quadruple trillion centuries (Calculation by https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm )

Other Examples:

  • "MyfavouritebookistheC-ReferencebyDennisRitchie"
  • "DreamTheaterandSymphonyXandPinkFloydrockhard!"
  • "Iamtoolazytofindanothercreativepasswordexample" <-- no one would guess that :D
  • "Somewhereovertherainbowbluebirdsfly"
  • "BarneyfromHowIMetYourMotherisAWESOME!"


XKCD approves:

source: http://xkcd.com/936/

2 comments:

  1. Never thought of any of these options as valid passwords... :D Next time I need one I'll recall your examples, by the way, I got here through your coursera profile link :D classmate

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