Thoughts on passwords?

[canuck31003]

I read a recent article about the escalating number of computer passwords people have to remember, sometimes having to think of a new one every 30 days or something, and it reminded me of my own password habits and how they're less than optimal.

My passwords are often not as strong and as they could be because I have to be able to memorize them, since I don't write them down anywhere.

I've always avoided password managers because I'm worried that if my master psd is compromised, then I lose everything.

I also read a different article where a "security guru" suggested actually writing down strong passwords, because the risk of losing a piece of paper stuck in your wallet, for example, is actually much less than the risk of someone hacking a weaker password.

I guess what I'm pondering this morning is, (1) is it more secure to use a password manager with a strong master password to keep track of many other strong passwords? or is the 2nd option better, where (2) the risk of losing a written list of your passwords is actually less than the risk of weaker passwords being hacked?

Or is it safer to have several "weaker" passwords with no record of them except in my head, but use the same password for more than one account?

Anyone else here have any comments, thoughts, opinions?

[san]

My passwords are often not as strong and as they could be because I have to be able to memorize them, since I don't write them down anywhere.

maybe about that you should try a diffrent way how to memorize the passwords. instead of memorize the single letter, use a quote which you can remember and build your password from it. for example by using the first latter of each word and replacing some letters by numbers or symbols which may look like the substituted letters. (replace s by $ for example and so on) and then maybe you can capitalize the nouns or whatever to get some capital letters.
perhaps i should begin doing that too.

(1) is it more secure to use a password manager with a strong master password to keep track of many other strong passwords?

the main concern about those which i have is: how transportable is it (if necessary)? i mean can you use them on any computer? especially on public ones which may have restrictions that you can't even run those managers. and therefore you can't get your passwords. if it's working who tells you that on those aren't any loggers installed which log everything what you do incl. the passwords.
i'd so there's no use for those if you aren't sure about your environment where you are using those.

(2) the risk of losing a written list of your passwords is actually less than the risk of weaker passwords being hacked?

well if you don't lose the list, but can't remember where you leave it. nothing helps you then. writing down passwords is the biggest security hole anyway. if it's not losing then maybe stealing.

Or is it safer to have several "weaker" passwords with no record of them except in my head, but use the same password for more than one account?

well perhaps now you can improve the weaker ones with stronger ones with the method mentioned above.
same password everywhere isn't the best thing too, but i'd say on simliar things using the same password is OK. with everthings on the net available you would need hundreds of passwords. just diffrent ones on the more sensitive stuff, where it would really hurt if someone hacks them.

[jeriddian]

Fortunately, I have a fairly good system. I have been an avid AD&D player in a single game for 28 years now. The same group of guys have been playing it with the same DM all of this time, so everything about that world is ingrained in our minds like real life. It's very easy to draw references from that which I can always remember, like characters' names (thus my name :jeriddian). The passwords are always related very easily to those character names, and all but unbreakable if you are not part of the game I play. And I trust those guys not to steal them.......well, except the dwarven thief guy, I don't know about him. He steals everything, it seems.........:P (j/k)

[canuck31003]

Ah... AD&D, that brings back memories. During high school my friends and I were avid players.

I have been an avid AD&D player in a single game for 28 years now.
Now that's dedication. :)

That using phrases is to generate passwords is a good idea. I'll have to try it.

[lunchmeat]

Fortunately, I have a fairly good system. I have been an avid AD&D player in a single game for 28 years now. The same group of guys have been playing it with the same DM all of this time, so everything about that world is ingrained in our minds like real life. It's very easy to draw references from that which I can always remember, like characters' names (thus my name :jeriddian). The passwords are always related very easily to those character names, and all but unbreakable if you are not part of the game I play. And I trust those guys not to steal them.......well, except the dwarven thief guy, I don't know about him. He steals everything, it seems.........:P (j/k)

And here I had been speculating that it had something to do with the Jeri-Dan towtruck company :)

[jeriddian]

Ah... AD&D, that brings back memories. During high school my friends and I were avid players.

I have been an avid AD&D player in a single game for 28 years now.
Now that's dedication. :)

Truthfully, you have no idea how dedicated......You would not believe the scope of this game.....IMHO, the greatest on the planet........seriously.

Fortunately, I have a fairly good system. I have been an avid AD&D player in a single game for 28 years now. The same group of guys have been playing it with the same DM all of this time, so everything about that world is ingrained in our minds like real life. It's very easy to draw references from that which I can always remember, like characters' names (thus my name :jeriddian). The passwords are always related very easily to those character names, and all but unbreakable if you are not part of the game I play. And I trust those guys not to steal them.......well, except the dwarven thief guy, I don't know about him. He steals everything, it seems.........:P (j/k)

And here I had been speculating that it had something to do with the Jeri-Dan towtruck company :)

I've seen those tow trucks around.:laugh: But no, they weren't the basis of the name.:P

[Not The CrimpMaster]

Most of my passwords are the same or slight variations of the same. In cases where a hacked account would really hurt (like Gmail or MySpace), I come up with a completely different password. In cases where I won't really care about a hacked account, I just pick something really, really simple.

[Cloud23465]

I have a standard password that I use for most fourms and websites and other non important things... but anything that is tied to money... the passwords get different and unique.

[kyojikasshu]

My favorite password to use is brilliant in its simplicity. It's unique to me because it comes from a project I worked on, offline, back in the 1990s, and nothing regarding that project has ever seen the light of day; never published, shared, or disseminated in any way, shape, or form.

I only use that one password for personal accounts, usually for message boards. For any account that actually involves monetary transfers, for example, I have a different series of passwords; for work, another entirely different series.

And then there are times where I use a different password for the heck of it.

[canuck31003]

Well, speak of the....

I came in to work this morning and find this in my inbox:

October is National Cyber Security Month and to celebrate, we’re launching... Tip of the Month series.

Today we introduce the concept of using a pass phrase instead of a password. Why?...because Pass Phrases are MORE SECURE and EASIER TO REMEMBER! Did you know that some agencies have already switched to pass phrases and that the Federal government may soon require all agencies to use them? Why not create yours now?

What’s the difference? When you think of a password, people generally think of a word like “Password” or a string of random symbols, such as “R*n]2eB%d” or a combination of the two such as “P@s$w0rd”. Pass phrases typically have spaces between words and are longer than the majority of words.

Examples of pass phrases:
My lizard eats 6 crickets daily!
Mix peanuts & oil 2 make peanut butter
shopping @ Macys 4 new furniture
2 much talking = big cell phone bills

Why is a pass phrase better? From the standpoint of password guessing or cracking, a 5- or 6-word pass phrase is roughly as strong as a completely random 9 character password. Most people can remember a 6-word pass phrase much easier than a totally random 9-character password.

How can you make a real secure pass phrase? Be creative. Make it personal to you--even funny.

Select a phrase that is more than 4 words—preferable 6

Stay away from common phrases or quotes

Mix short and long words and remember that sentences need not be intelligible

Character substitutions and/or misspelling strengthen the pass phrase

Mix languages

Exclude some of the spaces between words.


Truthfully, you have no idea how dedicated......You would not believe the scope of this game.....IMHO, the greatest on the planet........seriously.
Do you have one DM, or do you switch with different campaigns?

[jeriddian]

Do you have one DM, or do you switch with different campaigns?

One DM only. The Gamemaster himself. His idol, literally, is J.R.R. Tolkien. He resolved at a very young age to do what Tolkien did. He started when he was about thirteen and began to create his own world.

Tolkien was a linguist, and his love was language. He created languages. The main one he created was what we know now as Elvish. When he did this, he couldn't just leave it that way. He had to describe the people who actually spoke that language. This he took the notion of elves, which in the early 20th century were the pixie like mischievous creations of fables and transformed them into the majestic, intellectual, talented, longlived noble creatures as we know them today. Once Tolkien did that, he couldn't stop until he created the world of Middle-Earth around them, along with it history and its other creations, most notably orcs and hobbits, which are Tolkien creations all his own. Then he wrote the books.

What this DM did was almost exactly the same thing, with the exception that he tried to continue where Tolkien had left off. He created his own world and universe centered on Tolkien's concepts, using many of Tolkien's creations to detail this new world. This was before AD&D however, and when AD&D came along he actually adapted it to his world. The richness of the detail and the storyline of this particular campaign (Actually it's far, far too huge to call it merely a campaign. It truly is a completely different world experience.) truly beggars the attempt to describe it. Keep in mind, he created everything on his own. He used no modules to augment his game, although he drew from many influences that he read about both both in Sci-Fi, Fantasy, and other sources.

We started out in a standard dungeon setting in 1980, thinking only that we were going into the usual hack and slash, kill monsters, get treasure, go up in level sort of thing, only to find there were strange things going on. It was a difficult dungeon in which to advance. We figured out that there were events in the outside world which we needed to resolve if we were going to clear out the dungeon, which was what we were initially hired to do. But we found the dungeon was huge. (Three 5x8 index card boxes, completely full, all cards [about 600 of them] completely filled with the smallest barely readable script, was what was used to describe the rooms and things in the dungeon. That's the kind of attention to detail this DM always performed.) It took us 2 1/2 years of near weekly playing to get to the bottom of that dungeon. I lost four characters on the way there. The largest single adventure we played involved 35 major players and over 140 major characters in a grand free for all battle in a great dwarven city deep in the mountain where the dungeon was located. That was a non-stop 60 hour session.

When we got to the bottom, we found the great power source by which the world could be controlled, and we had to fight the Dark Lord to win it. We barely won it by the skin of our teeth. But that wasn't the end......

From there we found out there were alternate realities (Other campaigns using the same world, but with different groups of players.) They failed to win the great power source which could control the world in their realities. We had to find a way to integrate our reality with theirs, or face extinction of all realities. We eventually succeeded, but at great cost.

The game kept growing from there. We found out the lands we inhabited and thought we now controlled as the whole world were not the whole world. They were only a very small portion of it. He has the entire globe of his world mapped out, in detail. Imagine a complete atlas of the Earth completely laid out with all the maps. His world is completely described that way, and is about double the surface area of the Earth.

And there was more than one world. Initially we had five different 'worlds' (actually other planes). The others are well described, though not quite as much in detail as the Prime Material Plane world. Eventually, over the years, we found out there were 83 different fragmented planes, twelve limited planes, twelve middle planes, and twelve outer planes. Of course, we have the twelve inner planes, of which the Prime Material Planet is one, where 'Oerth", our planet is located. It may sound like it gets sci-fi 'ish, but it really doesn't. With things like Plane Travel and the such, magic is still the main way to get around, not technology. which is still very primitive.

As to magic, the standard magic-user, druid, cleric, illusionist magic is there, but classified as one overall type of magic, along with three or four other magic classes which he created (Artisan, Shifter, Protector). And this one type of magic is only one of twelve total he has invented, described, and detailed, with full spell lists and ways to use them.

The languages this DM created are 16 in total, one very very well described in terms of words, syntax, definition, and usage, as well as dialects. The others are also described, though not quite as well. He also has created the sixteen different writing systems and scripts that go along with each of these languages.

The pantheon of the gods is also detailed out well between good, evil, and neutral deities, and they do intersect with us mere mortals at times(although with great difficulty, and with great peril to our characters. We do avoid it if we can.)

This is a barely adequate description which really cannot touch the breadth and scope of this entire 'campaign'. It would take me hours, literally to describe it in enough detail to give you a good picture. In fact, a picture may be the best way for me to give you an insight. I can't do it right now, but I will post some of Imbic Seals. True, you don't know what an Imbic Seal is, but I'll explain it. Once you see it, you'll see the incredible complexity that makes this particular AD&D game IMHO the best campaign you'll ever see.

EDIT: Since I'm off topic, I'll start a new thread for this when I get back to you.:)

[canuck31003]

Wow! :ohmy::surprised::eek: That sounds amazing.