The Usability of Passwords

Re:The Usability of Passwords by russell on Saturday May 16, 2009 @12:29PM (#612287)

Well written and accessible; you mother would understand it. The best passwords, usability and safety, are three word phrases. Easy to remember and easy to type. To accommodate the rules at my clients, I use <Capitalized-word><punctuation><word>.

I worked with a password fanatic who used a generator to create 8-12 random character passwords, which he stored in his PDA, because he couldn't remember them. I dont think his method was more secure than mine. I didn't have to write mine down.

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Re:The Usability of Passwords by patio11 on Saturday May 16, 2009 @02:48PM (#612439)

I read an article from Microsoft advocating passphrases in 2004, and was taken with his rationale. I've been using them since then on everything except low-security accounts.

I now have much more diversity in the hundred or so passwords I actually use than I used to, and worry much less about forgetting them.

(P.S. Without loss of generality, pretend that for whatever reason I was reminded of Gummy Bears when signing up for my Gmail account. (An American TV show from back in the day.) I take a snippet of one line from their themesong, "dashinganddaring", which works fine as a password, optionally substituting a & for the "and" and with arbitrary capitalization. I'm highly unlikely to forget the password because, well, I've had perfect recall of that themesong for twenty years now.

I don't actually use cartoon theme songs, but everybody should have some source of highly entropic data that is evocative and meaningful to them.

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