passwords — James Poling

Creating a Strong Password is Easier than You Think

I was having a conversation the other day with someone about password entropy and how our current model of what we think is secure really isn’t all that secure, at least compared to what it could be.

The gist of my relevant points came from this xkcd comic.

Sadly, when put in the position of being put on the spot and trying to come up with four random words to use in a password I completely choked and two of the words were “james”. I’m pretty sure that’s not random enough.

Fortunately someone has come up with an xdcd password generator which works like a charm. I used it and decided it worked so well that I changed all of my passwords to the very first suggestion that came up, “fog fifty worried sleep”.

I, for one, can sleep a little more soundly knowing that my password entropy has nearly doubled enveloping all of my online content in a burrito shell of safety.

Top 500 Passwords of All Time

And people wonder why their accounts get hacked. How long do you imagine it takes a computer program to cycle through 500 password attempts on every single one of your accounts? But these are just amazingly bad.

There are some interesting passwords on this list that show how people try to be clever, but even human cleverness is predictable. For example, look at these passwords that I found interesting:

ncc1701 The ship number for the Starship Enterprise
thx1138 The name of George Lucas’s first movie, a 1971 remake of an earlier student project
qazwsx Follows a simple pattern when typed on a typical keyboard
666666 Six sixes
7777777 Seven sevens
ou812 The title of a 1988 Van Halen album
8675309 The number mentioned in the 1982 Tommy Tutone song. The song supposedly caused an epidemic of people dialing 867- 5309 and asking for “Jenny”

“…Approximately one out of every nine people uses at least one password on the list shown in Table 9.1! And one out of every 50 people uses one of the top 20 worst passwords..”