I know what you are thinking, WTF??? Before you start to flame me in the comments, let me explain.

There are two common problems with passwords.  One is that they are too easy to guess, and two you forget them.  In fact, they are inter-related or inversely proportional, if you make your password less easy to guess, it becomes harder to remember.  So some people use things like pets names, birthdays and so on.  One additional problem is that it is a hassle to change them if you have many accounts.  OpenID helps but not all sites use OpenID.

The way I am outlining is more secure, you are less likely to forget them and changing them is easier.

Here’s a photo of my plain text passwords.

The Passpaper

It folds up into the size of a credit card and so can be easily stored in my wallet.  I also have a copy stuck to my monitor.

Here’s a close-up and how it works.

Passpaper Basic

For each account, say hotmail, facebook, twitter, select a password from the list.  Whatever you do DON’T mark it on the paper.  Just remember the start and end position of the password.  This way, even if someone sees your list, like it is on your monitor, they won’t know your passwords.  You can decide the length of the password but it’s best if it is not less than 10 characters, and the more important the account the longer it should be.

For extra security, don’t always start and end your password on the boundaries.

Passpaper Intermediate Step

And add a couple of characters (or word) to the start or end of the password that are not on the paper.  Like this:

Passpaper Final Step

This means if someone takes your password paper, it won’t be as easy to brute force crack your password.

When it comes to changing passwords, just change the starting location of the password.

The alternative is to use a password store, like 1password, or the multi-platform KeepassX.  But the disadvantages of a password store are that you still need a master password which has the above weaknesses, and if you have the passwords generated for you, you won’t know them yourself.  The advantage of a password store is that your passwords can be very long and you can easily include strange characters.

Remember DON’T MARK the paper in ANY way!

For storing on the iPhone, I recommend using Dropbox. That way you can sync it easily and store the password paper in pdf format.  I should mention if you use that link to sign up both you and I get 250MB extra space free.

How to make the password paper? I used Illustrator but you can use Excel or any spreadsheet.  To generate the groups of random characters I used Keepass.

KeepassX Password Generator Settings

I selected characters that would be easy to type on the iPhone and removed similar characters and created a very long password and then split it up into small character groups.  For better entropy (which makes it harder to brute force) you could include all characters.

If anyone wants it, I can post up the Illustrator template I use.

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Tags: easier, passwords, plain text, secure, technique
This entry was posted on November 23rd, 2009 at 12:21 pm and is filed under lifehacks, techtips. You can follow any responses to this entry through the RSS 2.0 feed. You can leave a response, or trackback from your own site.