The use of passwords a mean of authentication is growing every day and we get more and more of these strings of characters to keep in our memory. How can you choose good passwords which are easy to remember but which is also secure to use and hard to crack for people intrested in your life?

Every new system we encounter ask us to choose a password. There is always a ruleset attached that it must be a minimum amount of characters, capitalized and non-capitalized characters, numbers and sometimes even special characters as explamaition marks, dots and commas. Most of us see this as something very frightening and looking at a seaming random password as W1cmp;7ac5h! we feel there is no way we could ever remember something as complex.

There are a few techniques we can use in situations like this and I would to share with you my favourite way of chosing and remembering complex passwords. This is a technique I daily use when I need to create passwords and since I started I have not yet needed to create yet another password like qwerty1234 or 123qwerty. Instead I can keep passwords of ten characters or more with mixed capitalization, numbers and special characters.

This is how I do it.

It all start with a sentance which can be connected to the password I am to create to simplify my way of remembering it. If I was to create a password for my Facebook account for example I could use a sentance like:

The place where I go to meet Ally and Bob; twice per day!

We now have created our source of randomness which we then can use to create an actual password. By attaching a ruleset to this sentance we can make it look more complex but still for ourselves completely logical.
First of all we can try to find all numericals which we can exchange with numbers. The word “twice” can be changed to a singe letter “2″. By using only the leading characters in all words together with the number two we now have created a password with upper- and lowercase letters, special characters and numbers!

The place where I go to meet Ally and Bob; twice per day!

become

TpwIgtmAaB;2pd!

More information/Disclaimer

• This is a commonly used technique which you can find more information about it in many places but I do recommend an article by Microsoft which I found to be very useful.

At first you might think that it is hard to remember a full sentance instead of just a few characters but I was amazed how much easier it was for me to do it this way. Next time you are to login to your Facebook account all you have to do is to remember what Facebook is all about – The place where I go to meet Ally and Bob; twice per day!