In a programmer’s mind

Is is possible to have a password that is both easy to remember and that is good enough to protect you? The answer is yes!

Some might think that to have a good password you need a lot of random letters of different case mixed with a lot of random number and mixed with a lot of random symbols. You can get those kind of password easily with a random password generator but it will not be easy to remember. It will looks like this:

1. Y^|^{v3c”w@m
2. ~zeEt<IFqQi&%D
3. TuK_PvYVSZ>|=>H,]4r6

What I should say is that there are passwords that are stronger than those ones but easier to remember if you factor in the length. Put in another way, there are passwords that are longer and as easy to remember.

Give a warm welcome to the diceware password creation method. If you read that page, you might get lost with the amount of content there is, but it is really simple. To create password using that method, you need to select a few random short words from a dictionary and put them together. For instance, let say that I pick those short words randomly:

1. spree
2. glyph
3. burp
4. ravel
5. lux

My final password would be “spreeglyphburpravellux”, “spree glyph burp ravel lux” or a variation of those words put together.

If you compare the first password created with the random password generator with the first password I created with the diceware method you might ask yourself how a 22 letters password is easier to remember than a 12 letters password. The answer to that question lies in the way our brain remember things or concepts. Remembering a password with 7 random characters is as hard as remembering a password with 7 random words because in the first case, the concepts you are storing are the characters and in the second one, the words.

It might seems weird at first that our brain works that way, but you can confirm this quite easily using a simple experiment. Try remembering a few random characters and the same amount of another concept. It can be colors, movie titles, scents, rock bands or any other thing you might think as a whole. Be creative. Next, try to write them down once in a while. Once you confirm this, go and create your first diceware password.

I have a few suggestions as to how you can put your words together. To make it a stronger password, you can space each words with a symbol, you can space them with an ordered number, you can make the first letter of each words a capital letter. Here are a few variations I came up with the same random words I choose above:

• SpreeGlyphBurpRavelLux
• spree1glyph2burp3ravel4lux
• spree$glyph$burp$ravel$lux
• sPree*gLyph(bUrp)rAvel_lUx