How to Make Usable and Secure Passwords

Image via WikipediaIt's no fun to have your Facebook or email password compromised. Here's an interesting article (and a FAQ) on how to prevent it.

The Usability of Passwords.
Written by Thomas Baekdal.

The Usability of Passwords - FAQ.
Written by Thomas Baekdal.

"Security companies and IT people constantly tells us that we should use complex and difficult passwords. This is bad advice, because you can actually make usable, easy to remember and highly secure passwords. In fact, usable passwords are often far better than complex ones."

One of the comments mentions that using fractured grammar may be a good idea:

'An intelligent phrase-based dictionary attack would give statistically probable phrases a higher weight than statistically improbable ones, and give known quotations an even higher weight. If you know the target's media preferences (as you might find on a social media profile) that narrows your initial search significantly.'

'Moving beyond that you'd try grammatically correct phrases over incorrect ones -- "fluffy bunny" is a lot more statistically probable than "bunny fluffy", because in English adjectives almost always precede the nouns they modify.'

Another comment mentions the common use of Rainbow Tables to do a simple lookup of encrypted passwords.

Note that Unix servers (like shell.uoregon.edu) use password encryption techniques "that make precomputation attacks [i.e., rainbow tables] for almost any length of password unfeasible against these systems for the foreseeable future."

You can check to see if any of your current passwords are in known rainbow tables. Should I Change my Password?