Of course I’m not asking you to give away your passwords. But for those of you who have so many, how do you keep track of them all? Do you use any unique methods?
I know many people struggle between having something that’s easy to remember and something that’s easy to guess. If you keep a note with your passwords on it, for example, it can be stolen, lost, or destroyed, or if you make them according to a pattern that’s easy to remember, the wrong people might find them easier to guess.
Password manager
Before password managers I used to come up with a phrase or nonsense word that was personally significant to me, or an inside joke. Some sort of “catch phrase” that would only make sense to me and maybe my closest friends. Sometimes just an initialism of something I’d know, like my ex-gf Angie (not her real name) had a gap in her teeth, so I’d tell my friends “Angie’s got a gap in her teeth so my dick’s gots to fit!” and so my password would be “Agagihtsmdg2f!”
2 ways
1 password manager
- I use them very often. I have a bunch of different yes complex passwords that I’m using repeatedly throughout the day so brute force rote memory….
But yeah. Password manager
hunter3for everything.You use 7 stars for your password?
Bitwarden and be done.
I used to have a couple of letters from the site/service followed by an obscure dialectal word that’s not found in dictionaries with a few characters replaced by numbers and symbols. Those two letters kind of work like salting to keep every hash of my password unique.
Now I just do bitwarden.
I don’t. Bitwarden and that’s it.
For passwords you have to keep in your head, diceware. Surprised it’s not already mentioned! Basically you roll dice to choose words from a long wordlist until you have 6 or 7 words.
Human brains are good at remembering words. It’s way easier to remember a password that looks like:
grandson estimator virtuous scabbed poet parasiticthan it is to remember a random character string.
My passwords are unfortunately very… “patterned”. Makes remembering them easier though.
I have a friend who resets his passwords whenever he connects. So he only remembers one password, that of his email. He claims it’s safer this way.
Theres… There’s something to it, I guess. Make sure your email is secure, and if not even you know your password, how can someone else. Christ, it sounds like a massive pain in the ass, though.
KeePassXC/DX.
I remember them two characters at a time.
Theres a couple of passwords I remember, like for logging on my PC and into my password manager
I use passphrases from movies of shows that I like. Then add a special symbol and a number that I like.
Thanks for nothing you useless reptile!61
This has 100.54 bits of entropy. I consider anything above 60 sufficient enough
Similar, but I just take the first letter of each word, keep proper pronunciation, and turn some into numbers as appropriate.
Two trailer park girls go round the outside, round the outside, round the outside.
Becomes
2tpggrto,rto,rto.
No, for the record I do not use THAT song.
Wouldn’t it be better to use the full quote, with some random numbers and symbols interspersed?
Depends. I like this because it’s shorter, but still maintains a good level of security, and I’ll never forget it. Technically the full password is stronger, yeah. This also has the added benefit of someone being able to see you type it or catch a glimpse of it plaintext for some reason and have NO chance of remembering it.
Either way, they’re both pretty secure, I just don’t wanna type several lines of… Anything each time I log in.
I worked in IT at a company years ago that standardized on song lyrics in a similar fashion:
4 Those about 2 rock we salute you!
I want 2 rock & roll all night
Etc.
i have difficult & long unique passwords for each of the important things (emails, bank, any official gov or edu sites etc.) that i keep on a piece of paper in my notebook (with a few backup copies). And i also have 3 degrees of difficulty for my other passwords that i use like this: easy “i could not care less if this account got hacked, in fact i know this password has been leaked in plain text before so whatever”, medium “i’d kinda suck if this got hacked but ultimately it’d not cause major issues”, hard “i do not want this to be hacked”
I use postal codes, street names and house numbers of addresses where I previously lived. They contain numbers and capital letters, are random for anyone else, but in doubt I can always look them up.
