Secure password creation tip #2

Published: 8-21-2012 2:45 pm

Password creation tip #2: Interweaving

Take a short common word that you can easily remember, such as your make of car or pet's name, and a short series of numbers that you can easily remember, such as your birthdate or that of a relative. Weave those two short things together, alternating one character at a time.

For example:

You drive a Honda and your birthday is today (happy birthday) and you were born in 1970 (8/21/70): H8o2n1d7a0

The capital H in Honda makes the password compliant for complexity after mixing the other letters and numbers, and length is a very respectable 10 characters.

Or, let's say your dog is Fido and your street address is 1234:  F1i2d3o4

If you'd prefer not to use capital letters, you can always add some excitement with a ! at the end (because you are really happy that fido with a lowercase f is your dog's name): f1i2d3o4!

Any of the portions of the passwords above would make horrible passwords by themselves; they are very public pieces of information that would be fairly obvious guesses. By interweaving them, however, you get a wonderfully complex password pattern that is still based on easy-to-remember tokens. Typing this kind of password is a bit challenging the first few times, but you can practice in a Word document, where you can see if you're typing correctly, and you'll be amazed at how quickly your fingers can adopt the pattern and type it quickly and accurately.

Please don't, however, save that Word document, print it out, and tape it to your monitor ;)

We hope this helps you create secure, easy-to-remember passwords!

JD