Philoso-tech blog Neomeme shows you a slick trick for creating bulletproof passwords: mix two memorable words together. The author calls this a “compound password”–here’s how it works:
Essentially, the compound password is a juxtaposition of two simple words, with their letters alternating. For example, dcoagt is a compound password. Can you see the two words in there? How about now: dcoagt. The two words in the compound password are “cat” and “dog.”
The author goes on to explain how compound passwords can defeat virtually all password-grabbing techniques. If you’re still using the dog’s name as your password, you’ll definitely want to read this enlightening article. While you’re at, check out this post on choosing secure passwords and Gina’s excellent Geek to Live feature on the same subject. — Rick Broida
Posted under Security
This post was written by Nicki on January 19, 2007
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That’s a nice methodology, but honestly, it can STILL be brute forced. There are some VERY fast programs out there that can compare hashes.
By adding some numbers, and even better, symbols (like punctuation) to your password, you can drastically lengthen the amount of time a brute force approach would require.
One nice trick I like to use is to think of a word that’s easy to remember, like manboob. Now just leetspeek it, by replacing letters with numbers and symbols: m@nb00b. Bam, that’s one solid password.
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Yes, but leetspeak is also more common now, and I’ve seen many programs that automatically leetspeak its password attempts/tries when trying to crack.
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Interesting. Then it would seem a combination of the two techniques is necessary: alternate 2 words so that it fails a wordsearch, but still leetspeak it so that it has to use the impossibly large vocabulary including all letters, numbers, and symbols.
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