this post was submitted on 16 Aug 2024
65 points (98.5% liked)
Privacy
31980 readers
244 users here now
A place to discuss privacy and freedom in the digital world.
Privacy has become a very important issue in modern society, with companies and governments constantly abusing their power, more and more people are waking up to the importance of digital privacy.
In this community everyone is welcome to post links and discuss topics related to privacy.
Some Rules
- Posting a link to a website containing tracking isn't great, if contents of the website are behind a paywall maybe copy them into the post
- Don't promote proprietary software
- Try to keep things on topic
- If you have a question, please try searching for previous discussions, maybe it has already been answered
- Reposts are fine, but should have at least a couple of weeks in between so that the post can reach a new audience
- Be nice :)
Related communities
Chat rooms
-
[Matrix/Element]Dead
much thanks to @gary_host_laptop for the logo design :)
founded 5 years ago
MODERATORS
you are viewing a single comment's thread
view the rest of the comments
view the rest of the comments
Using random characters is dumb.
It incetivices you to write it down (which in and of itself isn't a completely terrible idea).
As an IT guy, let me tell you, STOP using random passwords!
Use passphrases instead, it is far easier to remember a sentence than a random string of letters and numbers.
Battery horse staple
Correct!
I was twaching a class on how to use my company's software, and I used this comic as an example for the class, and someone said "Hey, that's the password we use!"
You can lead a horse to water, but you can't make 'em battery staple.
Yeah that's my preferred method too. Bitwarden's password generator can create passphrases too, so I have it just create random ones for pretty much everything. The only ones I have to remember are the ones to unlock Bitwarden itself, and the one to unlock the decryption when I boot my PC up. So like two sentences essentially. I literally don't even know what the passwords are to anything else lol.
Not to mention that if you want to type it in somewhere ( like your car for a Spotify account or whatever ) a passphrase like
Hunter7-Tower-Ballsy9is easier to type than some random gibberish with special chars.Agreed - the message I was trying to convey is that I use a very secure password, which sacrifices convenience for security - is this necessary though? I have no concerns related to memorising or particular difficulties typing it out as it follows a passphrase structure for the most part.
If your password was "is this necessary though" it's easy to remember and not difficult at all to type
If you are only relying on the password as security, then yes, if you use MFA in adition to a password, they also probably yes.
So yes.
Use a password manager instead.
Very inconvenient for a PC login. Also, you need a password you can remember for your password manager at least
Yeah, but you still need a password you can remember to unlock the password manager
Yes, but the problem is memorizing multiple passwords not one. The majority of ppl is able to memorize a single complicated password.
"nobody can crack this password in a million years" in pretty strong
Edit :
"nobody can crack this password in a million years with current technology"
That statement misses the advancement of technology
One can also mix in numbers and symbols and capital letters with their passphrase / sentence. Throw in a comma, exclamation mark, replace an l with 1, o with 0, etc. of course it’s diminishing returns with a sufficiently long passphrase but it can help against dictionary type attacks by adding additional mutations / steps to the cracking.
Years ago I worked at a company where they based server root/admin passwords on song lyrics. The person who came up with it clearly liked classic rock. I still remember at least one of them:
4ThoseAboutToRockWeSaluteYou!
Lyrics are a pretty good base. Especially in passphrase style with spaces if supported, along with punctuation and capitals/numbers. What sucks is when an account system can't support a long password. That's the most frustrating requirement for any service and the greatest vulnerability of all the common restrictions.
I just memorize 8 characters of gibberish. It is fast to type in.
I have also used a hybrid approach which is 2-3 words with ransom numbers and symbols
https://xkcd.com/936/
It is fairly easy to remember and not to hard to type in. I struggle with just a word list as I tend to misspell words or make typos. It also takes a while to type.