Teach42

This little tidbit has been sitting in my ‘to blog’ file for long enough that I forgot where I got it from. The problem with passwords it that most people use the exact same one for every site. If somebody discovers your password, they more than likely have access to an incredible number of interesting things, like your online bank account, credit cards sites if you pay online, your email, your weblog (you do have one of those, don’t you?) and so on. If you want to be secure, you should have a different password for every site. However, even that wouldn’t be that secure because someone could quite easily use a brute force hacktionary to discover any passwords you use that are based off of English words. If you really want to be secure, you would use a random string of characters, both letters and numbers, and use a different string for every site. Believe it or not I do know someone who does this. He uses a different random string for every site recuring a password and has them all locked up in a secure file that he keeps on his computer and PDA.

I think he’s nuts.

I like this solution much better. It’s a video by Jon Udell showing you a very cool new way to have a different secure passowrd for every site without a ridiculous amount of memorization. All you have to remember is one master password. Make that one as secure as you can. Since you’ll only need to remember one, it’s alright if it’s J3k823hur (no, that isn’t my password). Then you use a web site like this to generate a random password for you based on your master password and the site’s URL. There’s a handy dandy bookmarklet to make things even easier. Thankfully, he also allows you to save the page offline so you can use it even when you don’t have an internet connection, and you can also host it from your own server (no worrying about it going down). I put a copy of it here and have used it for several sites. Quick, easy and secure.

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