How do you generate passwords? [closed]

Answer 1

I don't like random character passwords. They are difficult to remember.

Generally my passwords fall into tiers based on how important that information is to me.

My most secure passwords tend to use a combination of old BBS random generated passwords that I was too young and dumb to know how to change and memorized. Appending a few of those together with liberal use of the shift key works well. If I don't use those I find pass phrases better. Perhaps a phrase from some book that I enjoy, once again with some mixed case and special symbols put it. Often I'll use more than 1 phrase, or several words from one phrase, concatenated with several from another.

On low priority sites my passwords are are pretty short, generally a combination of a few familiar tokens.

The place I have the biggest problem is work, where we need to change our password every 30 days and can't repeat passwords. I just do like everyone else, come up with a password and append an ever increasing index to the end. Password rules like that are absurd.

Answer 2

I start with the initials of a sentence in a foreign language, with some convention for capitalizing some of them. Then, I insert in a particular part of the sentence a combination of numbers and symbols derived from the name of the application or website.

This scheme generates a unique password for each application that I can re-derive each time in my head with no trouble (so no memorization), and there is zero chance of any part of it showing up in a dictionary.

Answer 3

The algorithm in apg is pretty cool. But I mostly use random characters from a list which I've defined myself. It is mostly numbers, upper- and lowercase letters and some punctuation marks. I've eliminated chars which are prone to getting mistaken for another character like '1', 'l', 'I', 'O', '0' etc.

Answer 4

import random

length = 12
charset = "abcdefghijklmnopqrstuvwxyz0123456789"

password = ""
for i in range(0, length):
    token += random.choice(charset)

print password

Answer 5

Joel Spolsky wrote a short article: Password management finally possible

…there's finally a good way to manage all your passwords. This system works no matter how many computers you use regularly; it works with Mac, Windows, and Linux; it's secure; it doesn't expose your passwords to any internet site (whether or not you trust it); it generates highly secure, random passwords for each and every site, it's fairly easy to use once you have it all set up, it maintains an automatic backup of your password file online, and it's free.

He recommends using DropBox and PasswordSafe or Password Gorilla.

Answer 6

The Firefox-addon Password Hasher is pretty awesome for generating passwords: Password Hasher

The website also features an online substitute for the addon: Online Password Hasher