Password Security
My mother has recently started to shop online and has signed up for Paypal. Naturally security is a concern, so I helped her setup a strong password for her account.
The problem with a strong password is that by its very nature it is designed to be difficult to guess. But that also has the unwanted consequence of being easy to forget.
A bunch of random characters, letters(both upper and lower case), and numbers is not the easiest to memorise. You could just write it down somewhere, but that kind of defeats the purpose of a strong password. Writing it down is inadvisable and is especially so when dealing with an account that has access to your credit card.
There are programs that will securely store your passwords for you. They work by encrypting the passwords in a file or database. The only way to access them is by entering a…(you guessed it) – password!
I’ve a way of creating memorable passwords that works for me and I think it could be useful to others.
I pick a group of letters, for example the vowels or the letters of a word I’ll easily remember(like john for example). I then substitute the letters in this group with characters or numbers. So “John” might become “{0#9”. That’s substituting { for J, 0 for o, # for h, and 9 for n. This group of characters then becomes the key by which I encrypt my password.
For example, if my password is “Jackinthebox” it would become “{acki9theb0x”. Does that make sense?
Another thing I do is capitalise the first letter of each word in my password. So”{acki9theb0x” now becomes “{ackI9TheB0x”.
The idea is that the phrase “jackinthebox” is easy to remember for me. Then I use the key, which I can write down, to encrypt my password. The bonus is I can use encrypt other passwords with the same key. So my Paypal account might use “{ackI9TheB0x” but my email account might be “Spi99i9gT0p”.
On a side note – it’s good to use different passwords for different accounts. Until recently I had one password for everything.
Using a method like this is pretty secure. The chances of someone guessing it or using a program to hack it are slim.
Does this make sense to you?
Do you want to share any methods you’ve found useful for remembering a password? Or have you used one of the password wallet programs and what did you think of it?
Thanks for reading.