{"id":24024,"date":"2021-07-30T08:00:09","date_gmt":"2021-07-30T15:00:09","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/?p=24024"},"modified":"2021-07-21T17:56:31","modified_gmt":"2021-07-22T00:56:31","slug":"passwords-in-your-head","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.podfeet.com\/blog\/2021\/07\/passwords-in-your-head\/","title":{"rendered":"Generating Random, Secure, Memorable Passwords in Your Head \u2013\u00a0by Allister Jenks"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"1Password<\/a>In late 2020 AgileBits, the folks behind 1Password<\/a>, published a blog post entitled Randomness (or things humans do poorly)<\/a>. It\u2019s a fascinating article on randomness in computers, but near the beginning is this paragraph.<\/p>\n

As I\u2019ve alluded to with the title of this post, humans are notoriously terrible at creating randomness.<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

You\u2019ll doubtless have heard this concept before. Indeed Allison mentioned it in her recent, and excellent, rundown of everything a password manager can do for you<\/a>. But\u2026 while we are naturally<\/em>\u00a0poor at randomness, we can<\/em>\u00a0learn!<\/p>\n

A lot of years ago I was visiting a company office in another city when the manager, Denis, called me into his office. These were the days of dumb terminals connected to a central, large computer. That large computer was my area of responsibility and he was trying to log in but could not remember his password. The passwords on this system were short \u2013 between six and ten characters \u2013 but did require the use of at least one digit.<\/p>\n

It was at this time I developed a simple method of coming up with new passwords I would be able to remember, as we had to change them every 60 days. Think of a topical word, between six and ten characters in length, that has at least one letter \u2018i\u2019 or \u2018o\u2019 in it. Your password would be that word with any \u2018i\u2019s replaced with ones and \u2018o\u2019s replaced with zeroes. An example might be \u201ch0sp1tal\u201d if you\u2019d recently had the misfortune to visit one, or \u201ch0l1day\u201d if you were looking forward to one. I had taught this approach to Denis on a previous visit and had suggested he look around his office for inspiration. I asked him if he had followed my advice last time he changed it and he confirmed he had, so I told him to look around the room and see if he could spot what it was. It was then he told me that the source of his randomness had been a truck driving past his window!<\/p>\n

Coming forward to today, ten character passwords are not good enough, but memorable<\/em>\u00a0passwords are still a good idea and can be very secure. I\u2019ve been a long-time user of Bart\u2019s XKPasswd.net<\/a> web site and even built automated actions so I could generate new passwords right on my Mac with my favourite recipes. If you can\u2019t access XKPasswd you can likely use your password manager to generate memorable passwords, and hopefully it\u2019s on your phone which you always have with you. But sometimes you might not have access to a suitable generator, or, like me, you prefer the XKPasswd recipes and your password manager can\u2019t produce them like that. For most use cases, any password will do, but there are some places I know I will log in a lot from different places and I would like it to be super easy for me to remember the password. At times like these, I generate them in my head.<\/p>\n

\"PhotoLet\u2019s do this as an exercise. I\u2019m going to help you generate a suitably random password that would be difficult for anyone to guess. A quick note here that this process does require that you be sighted, though I imagine folks with vision impairment could come up with a variation that works for them.<\/p>\n

Look around the room you are in. It helps a lot if you are an untidy person like me. Look for an interesting word that is printed on some object. When I say interesting, I mean don\u2019t settle on things like \u201cthe\u201d or \u201cthis\u201d. Also, try to avoid words you\u2019d expect to see often like \u201cApple\u201d or any word on your keyboard. Looking around me right now I can see the following things.<\/p>\n