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PassPub - Hard Passwords Made Easy
August 15, 2007

A quick end of summer, beginning of school year check. Are you still using the same password from last year? Is it still "hello"? This might be a great time to review your list of passwords and take some steps towards making them more secure.

There are many reasons why strong passwords are important. When you think about it, those 6-12 characters are all that stand between your e-mail and the rest of the world. Or, to be a bit more blunt - your money and the rest of the world. And yet, coming up with a quality password - hard to guess but easy to remember - can be a real challenge.

PassPub makes it a bit easier. This password generation tool will provide you with possible passwords built around helpful remembering tools. You can pick a keyboard combination (letters in patterns on the keyboard), a chemical element (that well known format in the style of H2O) or passwords that have some sort of built in mnemonic (like K0ff3[uP). Or, if you are looking to secure your wirelss, you can get a seriously secure 256 bit password like 0FB56559C81B20CBA06AA159875A24133D9A2E4E66A966517BB1.

If you clicked a few times on PassPub and still didn't see a password that worked for you, another trick is to build a passphrase style password using multipe words like "crnchyappls" or "iluvmygato." For extra security avoid having dictionary words or common phrases in your passphrase. A final suggestion is to build a passphrase like "ihavefourwildandcrazycats" and then turn it into a password as "1h4w/cc" which you can always remember using the full length phrase. Just don't say the phrase out loud as you remember the abbreviated version!

In the end, pretty much any password can be broken. The trick is making it just hard enough that after trying "hello" and your first name, students or other casual miscreants will move on to try the next username.

Posted by Chris Harris on August 15, 2007 | Comments (0)