Most people are rubbish at picking secure passwords – “pr0gn0s1s” for instance is a crap password. Taking an English word or a name and then changing a few of the letters just doesn’t cut it. Why? Well, the complex explanation is given in XKCD Comic but for normal mortals it works like this.
Most hacking attempts aren’t a done by a smart but misguided geek, they’re done by other computers and they’re dictionary based. That doesn’t always mean an English dictionary, rather a list of words that are commonly used in passwords. A computer program works through the dictionary trying each phrase in turn. Unsurprisingly hackers are well aware that people change O to zero etc. so all those combinations are tried too. Thus using the password “pr0gn0s1s” will take maybe a millisecond more to crack than simply “prognosis”. Changing letters to numbers is almost no help in making a password more secure[1].
So how do we avoid this?
1. Use Multiple Unrelated Words
XKCD makes a good point, you can just use multiple unrelated words, spelt entirely normally. By unrelated I mean that “DavidBeckham” is 2 words but would be a monumentally terrible password. “hollowpoolbutton” is much better and much easier to remember. “The Hollow Crown” is a series of Shakespeare plays on BBC TV, “Crown Pools” is a swimming pool in Ipswich, “Poole” is the town where Jenson Button (a racing driver) wasn’t born (but I thought he was until I just Googled him). So this is an easy password for me to remember.
This might not sound like it’s better than “pr0gn0s1s” but it is, massively so. There are more than 200,000 words that could follow “hollow” and another 200,000 that could follow “pool”. That’s more than 40 billion possibilities. A bit better than the handful of different substitutions that can be made in “prognosis”.
2. Insert Something Foreign Into a Word
Another way that sounds rather counter-intuitive but is surprisingly effective is to add something into the middle of a word rather than replacing a letter. So instead of “pr0gn0s1s” you could use “progn9osis”. Now it’s not an English word any more and it’s not an obvious change. Personally I’m not happy with a single insertion, but dump an entire other word in and it makes a big difference. It is massively improbable that “prognmintosis” would ever be tried by a hacker.
3. Use The First Letters of a Passage of Text
The last simple method I’ll mention is to find a phrase, a bit of poetry, prose or song fragment and take the first letter of each word. So if you’re a big Samuel Taylor Coleridge fan you might select;
“The naked hulk alongside came,
And the twain were casting dice;”
from the most excellent (but rather scary) Rime of the Ancient Mariner. This would make a password of “tnhacattwcd” which scores well on all levels. It feels like a secure password, it actually is a secure password and it’s easy to remember.
[1] So why do a lot of systems insist that we use password which contain letters, numbers, punctuation or conform to even more strange rules? Well some people really are unbelievably crap at passwords. They’ll use their own names, pet names or other information that a lot of people would know and could easily guess. At least if they’ve got a number or some punctuation in the password they stand some chance of their new credit card not being immediately hacked by their 5 year old son.