How to choose a good password/passphrase

Tips, Tricks and Tutorials Tutorials & Guides
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Some background information

This “TED talk” video provides some insight into what people actually choose etc. It’s very informative and quite entertaining.
LINK: https://www. ted.com/ talks/ lorrie_faith_cranor_what_s_wrong_with_your_pa_w0rd#t-831689
Please note I had to add some “spaces” in the url to stop it loading as a video on this page.

If you copy the url into a browser and remove the spaces you arrive at the TED website. There you can play the video and also download it.

Languages other than English when you download
When you klick the “Download” button a new window appears - it allows you to choose if you want to download the talk with/without subtitles. AND, you can choose the language for the subtitles from a number of different languages.

Play the video here:

Languages other than English
When you mouse over the bottom of the video a control panel appears. One of the controls allows you to directly select a language for subtitles which are then displayed at once. :slight_smile:

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Diceware

There is a method known as “diceware”

Website:
http://world.std.com/~reinhold/diceware.html

(This was mentioned on the Arch security wiki).

This marks the end of alpinejohn’s post.
next entry here…this is intended to be a “wiki”

A command line tool - apg

There’s a command line tool called apg that you can use to drop random passwords with mnemonics.

~/Desktop$ apg

Please enter some random data (only first 16 are significant)
(eg. your old password):>
FrejdeerjEd5 (Frej-deerj-Ed-FIVE)
bonEivwikis0 (bon-Eiv-wik-is-ZERO)
ItEnt6FrajCu (It-Ent-SIX-Fraj-Cu)
De6wrieg5 (De-SIX-wrieg-FIVE)
chenImCeov2 (chen-Im-Ce-ov-TWO)
optIavvott8 (opt-Iav-vott-EIGHT)

Steve’s haystack page is interesting:

https://www.grc.com/haystack.htm

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keepassx is good, https://www.keepassx.org/

  • Keepassx can store hundreds of accounts and passwords in an encrypted database. It only requires the user to remember one good password to gain access to the keepassx database.
  • Keepassx contains its own built in password generator which is easy to use and makes hard to guess cryptographic passwords as long or short and you want. It’s easy to adjust the number of characters and specify if you want to exclude some kinds of characters.
  • If you have dropbox or a similar online account you can store the keepassx database there so it will be synced to all your devices and available wherever you travel.
  • Usernames and passwords can be copied and pasted in or out of keepassx to or from your account web page that you are trying to open, so you don’t have to type them manually unless you want to.
  • Other notes can be stored in Keepassx as well, and it can handle hyperlinks, (the url of your account login pages for example).
    *Keepassx cross platform and published under the terms of the GNU General Public License.
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I happened to find this YouTube called For Nearly 20 Years the Nuclear Launch Code at all Minuteman Silos in the United States Was 00000000 - It’s only about 6 and a half minutes. Some of the comments under it are quite witty too. I couldn’t resist adding it here, I hope that’s okay.