How to create the most secure password, The first thing you learn when you try to create a good password is that your memory is pretty terrible. The second thing you might learn is that you're really bad at being random.
True randomness is hard to predict; humans aren't. Even if you’re not one of the millions of people who use passwords like “12345678” or “password,” you might still be making some amateur mistakes. For example, using a common phrase as your password, but then replacing the “i” with a “1,” or the "a" with a "@," and so on. Or using common words and phrases, and putting the characters and numerals at the end of the password, instead of spaced randomly throughout. Or re-using passwords across sites, or not changing them often enough.
In short, basically any technique that would allow a human being to actually remember a password.
Okay, you say, but how do you possibly get around this? Any password that is going to be reasonably secure is also going to be impossible to remember. And any password you can possibly remember is probably going to be terrible. That’s just the law of passwords, right?
As the Post's Alexandra Petri writes, “The perfectly secure, perfectly memorable password is absolutely pure and rarer than the unicorn.... That is to say, no one has ever found it, and some doubt whether it exists at all.”But two researchers at the University of Southern California may have finally come up with the perfect solution. Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight of the University of Southern California have published a paper with a novel solution for creating with passwords that are both extremely hard to crack and relatively easy to remember: randomly-generated poems.
The inspiration for Ghazvininejad and Knight’s study was actually a cartoon, created by Randall Munroe of Xkcd, which showed how a password made up of four random words – like “correct horse battery staple” – is far more secure and a lot easier for people to remember than the typical jumble of random letters, numbers and symbols that most people think of as a secure password.
True randomness is hard to predict; humans aren't. Even if you’re not one of the millions of people who use passwords like “12345678” or “password,” you might still be making some amateur mistakes. For example, using a common phrase as your password, but then replacing the “i” with a “1,” or the "a" with a "@," and so on. Or using common words and phrases, and putting the characters and numerals at the end of the password, instead of spaced randomly throughout. Or re-using passwords across sites, or not changing them often enough.
In short, basically any technique that would allow a human being to actually remember a password.
Okay, you say, but how do you possibly get around this? Any password that is going to be reasonably secure is also going to be impossible to remember. And any password you can possibly remember is probably going to be terrible. That’s just the law of passwords, right?
As the Post's Alexandra Petri writes, “The perfectly secure, perfectly memorable password is absolutely pure and rarer than the unicorn.... That is to say, no one has ever found it, and some doubt whether it exists at all.”But two researchers at the University of Southern California may have finally come up with the perfect solution. Marjan Ghazvininejad and Kevin Knight of the University of Southern California have published a paper with a novel solution for creating with passwords that are both extremely hard to crack and relatively easy to remember: randomly-generated poems.
The inspiration for Ghazvininejad and Knight’s study was actually a cartoon, created by Randall Munroe of Xkcd, which showed how a password made up of four random words – like “correct horse battery staple” – is far more secure and a lot easier for people to remember than the typical jumble of random letters, numbers and symbols that most people think of as a secure password.
Blogger Comment
Facebook Comment