Suggestion: pwgen
Wietse Venema emailed to let us know about his password generator with a difference — the passwords are easily memorized. Or so they say.
I tried creating a few passwords with pwgen (a name that betrays its Unix roots) to see if I could indeed remember them. A few minutes ago I generated choibiiB — and just typed it out from memory. OK, let’s try another one: I played with one of the thriftmac cats for awhile after generating quahZaiw. And there you go — I remembered it.
What makes these passwords easy to remember is that they can be pronounced, in their own bizarre way, as if they were real words. I’m not sure how it is that I remembered which letter was capitalized, but that somehow seemed to make sense as well — as if it were the syntax for a foreign language.
But have no fear: Wietse assures us that these passwords are also secure.
All in all, it’s a great idea. People often use insecure passwords for the simple reason that secure ones are too hard to remember. Thanks to pwgen, we’ll never again have this excuse.
Posted Tuesday, December 8, 2009 in Suggestions
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