Of course I’m not asking you to give away your passwords. But for those of you who have so many, how do you keep track of them all? Do you use any unique methods?
I know many people struggle between having something that’s easy to remember and something that’s easy to guess. If you keep a note with your passwords on it, for example, it can be stolen, lost, or destroyed, or if you make them according to a pattern that’s easy to remember, the wrong people might find them easier to guess.
Password manager
I try to use passwords that look like sentences. For example you could “SpotifyIsAwesome!2024”. Easy to remember, hard to crack
I only need a couple “real” passwords. They are long, complex, and backed by 2fa
Historically I re-used things from personal history. I know I shouldn’t but they’re easier to remember since I already memorized them. Usually they’re not public data, more like
- my first PIN of my first ever bank card is now additional authentication for my app with my current bank
- one password is the name and IP (with substitutions) of one of my favorite servers from a job 15 years ago when I ran my own lab
- I gotta admit, I still have some trivial passwords for things that seem trivial
But my passwords are mostly generated (and the password to that is complex and unique, plus requires additional Auth). Anything from the last couple years also has a unique generated email
My company is pretty serious about such things: I have generated passwords, two separate 2fa apps and a yubikey. Plus they have some annoying shit on the laptop that is sometimes annoying
I have four passwords I memorize: my password manager, my main email, my work login, and a throw away password for stuff that doesn’t matter too much (signing up for giveaways, throw away social media accounts, etc). For everything else I have the password manager create some twenty character monstrosity.
The four memorized ones are all nine letter words with numbers and symbols replacing letters usually always including a comma somewhere as I heard once that a comma makes a password hardet to crack (but, now thinking about it, I don’t know where I heard that and it sounds like a myth).
For the work passwords I have to remember and cannot always access a password manager, I use pass phrases instead. Statistically, 3 random, non-similar words, are more secure than normal passwords. Changing random letters to symbols and capitalizing can further improve the security. For instance…
- Stove glob3 hamst#r
- pants Stuffin& quote
- z1ptie float beet$l
