Using Password Phrases For Better Security.
Did you know that Windows supports using passwords of up
to 127 characters? I don't use passwords anymore, and I haven't for years.
I've switched to using password phrases instead.
Why do I use password phrases?
- Why would you want to remember a password like
2%d7as$d when you could just remember a sentence like "donations are really
bad right now" or "May cut research for newsletters" or "I hate
my old car!" or "Holy Molly does this job suck!"
- You can use uppercase, lowercase, special characters,
or even spaces… but you are using them in context, which makes it much more
natural to remember.
- Post-it notes on your monitor are not secure. Sorry.
- Even the most efficient forms of password cracking,
using pre-computed rainbow tables, will never be able to crack a password with
20 or more characters.
These days, windows passwords can be cracked in no more
than a few seconds. If somebody can get physical access to your machine, they
can boot off one of the hacker tool cds available all over the internet, and
they will typically have your password in seconds, if they know what they are
doing.
Even with brute force cracking, there is no possible way
that you can crack a password that long. Even if somebody had the super
computing power to do so, hopefully you change your password every few months
or so.
It may be difficult to use password phrases on other
operating systems, or especially on websites, because they don't properly
handle spaces in the password, or have a small password length limit. One of
the tricks that I usually do is use a password phrase without the spaces, if I
possibly can.
So go change your password now.
