Choosing A Good Password

Posted March 9, 2006

I thought everybody knew this, but appears that’s not the case. Here’s how you create a good password:

Think of a sentence you won’t forget. Here’s one:

I hate thinking of passwords, it’s such a hassle.

If you really can’t think of one, pick up the closest book to you, turn to a random page, and select a random sentence.

Now, create the password as the first letter of each word in the sentence:

Ihtop,isah

There you go. That is a password that is hard to crack, but easy to remember. Because you just remember the sentence.

If you picked a sentence out of the book, you can throw in the page number into the password also.

2 Comments so far

Avi Flax on March 10th, 2006

I personally prefer having a single master password, and using a Javascript MD5 hash with the site domain name to create a unique password for every site, that I can regenerate any time if needed. That way I have only a single password to remember.

My favorite tool for this purpose is a bookmarklet from labs.zarate.org: password generator.
Eric on May 3rd, 2006

I just use MakePassword.com, instead. =)