24 ms·

Write your passwords down (2010)

92 points by smartmic 3y ago

chadams 3y ago
https://pocketmod.com/ https://pocketmod.com/ has this exact password system. It's under "Misc/Passwords" and shows a grid of random characters you can seed.
deleted 3y ago
[deleted]
gostsamo 3y ago
Don't use fancy combinations. Word phrases are even more random and much easier to remember. E.G. "touch-some-grass" is rander longer than any recommended minimum and hardly could be connected to any website.
- pmw 3y ago
  One of my toy projects is https://phrase.shop https://phrase.shop -- a small webapp that generates grammatically correct phrases that are both random and memorizable.
- skerit 3y ago
  Exactly, using phrases is so much nicer and better in every way. It annoys me when sites demand a password should have a special character or upper case letter in it. Or even worse: a max length.
  - jug 3y ago
    Max lengths are so sketchy because this makes it more likely the crazy guys are actually storing your password rather than the fixed size hash.
    - ellisv 3y ago
      I remember my annoyance when I banked with Wells Fargo and they had a maximum password length of something like 12 or 16 characters. Later I found out they would lowercase the password before sending it to the server.
    - AtNightWeCode 3y ago
      Passwords are sent to the server though in most cases. So there must be some limit.
      - mcny 3y ago
        What should this limit be? Personally, I think the limit should be nothing smaller than a thousand characters. Or even allowing something like a hundred characters or more would be better. I remember at some point Hotmail had a maximum length limit of sixteen characters. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/secret-microsoft-policy-limited-hotmail-passwords-to-16-characters/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/secre...
        falcolas 3y ago
        100Kb is a perfectly reasonable length IMO. Only takes seconds to send even over terrible links.
        iLoveOncall 3y ago
        It becomes problematic when it needs to be hashed, you can essentially DDOS servers by sending extremely long passwords that need to be hashed.
        falcolas 3y ago
        Realistically speaking, the hash would be your smallest problem if you're being DDoSed. Bcrypt for example would require at most ~6.4Mb of memory to do the hash, and more realistically only the 100k plus some constant. And modern CPUs are pretty efficient at doing the encryption steps, meaning little additional load for encrypting a larger value.
        AtNightWeCode 3y ago
        [flagged]
    - bradyd 3y ago
      Some of the password hashing algorithms have maximum input lengths. For example bcrypt only allows up to a 72 byte string. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt
  - Zambyte 3y ago
    Just use that kind of passphrase for your password manager master password, and let it generate valid passwords for you.
  - NikkiA 3y ago
    Until you hit a site that silently drops everything after the first space in your, now 5-6 character, pass phrase.
  - JohnFen 3y ago
    > using phrases is so much nicer and better in every way. Except for with me. I find phrases much more difficult to remember and use than passwords, personally. Although in either case, I'll need to have the ones I don't use daily somewhere where I can look them up, because there's no chance I'll remember them.
  - tracker1 3y ago
    My password manager is generally set to 30 random characters with all options. Max lengths bug the crap out of me, or limited character options... I mean, just use utf8 + normalization before hashing. Min-length should be the only requirement (if that). If I want to write in morse-code using dots and dashes, let me (I don't but had a friend that used to do that). Actually, the only thing worse, is not being able to paste into the password field(s)... you create a long random password, and now you can't paste it... great.
- teddyh 3y ago
  Your example is misleading; “touch-some-grass” is hardly random. “horse-battery-staple-correct" is presumably randomly chosen, and is therefore a better example phrase.
  - cubefox 3y ago
    I'm not sure how safe this is against dictionary attacks. And it's still not overly easy to remember.
    - ndriscoll 3y ago
      It's 100% safe from dictionary attacks. You can even make it grammatically correct. Just choose something like adjective-noun-adverb-transitive_verb-adjective-noun. If you choose each of six words randomly from a list of the 2k most common words with that part of speech, you get 66 bits of entropy, which is slightly more entropy than a random 11 character alphanumeric password with upper and lower case, but vastly easier to remember, type, and say out loud if you need to tell someone. Think of the words as just a view/rendering of a random bit string. You generate random numbers and then use that to index into your word lists to display those numbers. If you use an injective function for your view, you can choose it to have whatever "nice" (for humans) properties you want (e.g. grammatical validity), and no entropy will be lost (or gained).
  - gostsamo 3y ago
    Yep, lazy example, but even grammatically correct sentences are a lot. The idea though is for the passphrase to be something invoking a distinct image for the owner and I'm coming from a vacation. :)
    - teddyh 3y ago
      Yes, it’s all fine if it is actually randomly chosen, with enough bits: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14970652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14970652>
- pajko 3y ago
  There's an xkxd for this: https://xkcd.com/936/ https://xkcd.com/936/ And yet our infrastructure demands so obscure passwords I keep forgetting them all the time.
  - Eric_WVGG 3y ago
    There's an understated bonus to "correct horse battery staple" passwords — they're easier to type on iPhone and Android keyboards. So besides being of questionable security benefits, 0bScur3 passwords also bonk that advantage of nice-long-easy-to-remember passwords.
    - jamesponddotco 3y ago
      Or on a PS5, Nintendo Switch, and whatnot. So much easier to type and remember.
      - tracker1 3y ago
        Yeah, streaming accounts are probably the only ones in my password manager that aren't randomly generated for that reason. "Gimme movies now!" (not my actual passphrase)
        jamesponddotco 3y ago
        Mine are still randomly generated, but using the diceware method. Best of both worlds, really.
  - ckozlowski 3y ago
    There was an arstechnica article a while back with a password cracker (person) who had an answer for this: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/how-crackers-make-minced-meat-out-of-your-passwords/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/how-c... "The specific type of hybrid attack that cracked that password is known as a combinator attack. It combines each word in a dictionary with every other word in the dictionary. Because these attacks are capable of generating a huge number of guesses—the square of the number of words in the dict—crackers often work with smaller word lists or simply terminate a run in progress once things start slowing down. Other times, they combine words from one big dictionary with words from a smaller one. Steube was able to crack "momof3g8kids" because he had "momof3g" in his 111 million dict and "8kids" in a smaller dict. "The combinator attack got it! It's cool," he said. Then referring to the oft-cited xkcd comic, he added: "This is an answer to the batteryhorsestaple thing."" The entropy factors I see listed as in the xkcd comic are only valid if the cracking entity is doing a brute force attack. But skilled attacks won't be doing this. There's still nothing that beats a truly random string. But as others pointed out, it's also the most inconvenient to try to manage and remember.
- ipython 3y ago
  But with transformer models it would probably be trivial to predict the top 10 next words if your passphrase is grammatically correct. Interesting password cracker idea …
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    Done correctly, you choose words (uniformly) randomly from some dictionary, so the best a model can do is predict that all words from the dictionary are equally likely. All a model does is approximate probabilitly distributions, but the distribution isn't a secret; it's uniform. The dictionary doesn't need to be a secret either. The strength comes from the dictionary size and number of words.
    - ipython 3y ago
      But the parent comment I responded to used the example passphrase “touch-some-grass” which is most definitely not a uniform distribution of words. Yes, done correctly this is secure.
- jamesponddotco 3y ago
  For anyone looking for a dictionary for diceware passwords (or passphrases, or whatever you call them), I have one available over here[1] with over 23000 words with a minimum of 3 characters. [1] https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/acopw-go/tree/trunk/item/words/word-list.txt https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/acopw-go/tree/trunk/item/w...
  - Verdex 3y ago
    There also exists a few word lists online in the public domain. For example, project gutenberg has Moby Word Lists by Grady Ward which is supposedly in the public domain (at least for the USA). https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3201 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3201 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3201/files/ https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3201/files/ Last time I looked into it, there were a few different options floating around for word lists.
- pkulak 3y ago
  And 1 out of 100 websites will accept that password, unfortunately.
  - mgfist 3y ago
    You can just append whatever character requirements they have. So instead of "correcthorsebatterystaple", you can do "CorrectHorseBatteryStaple123!". Should meet most requirements. Although I just use a password manager but to each their own.
    - WorldMaker 3y ago
      Also, spaces sometimes count as "special character" requirements, so sometimes just "sentence form" passes: "Correct, 1 horse battery staple!"
EdTechAndrew 3y ago
Question for security experts: Is this really that much more secure than a local only password manager, like KeePass? It is fun, but the inconvenience of it feels like its not worth the benefits.
- Agent766 3y ago
  I don't think it is. I recommend using a password manager that supports hardware 2fa. One of the main issues with the proposed paper mechanism are that it doesn't support rotating passwords individually. Another is sites that share second and third characters would share a password.
- lobsterthief 3y ago
  Also, wallets are commonly lost and stolen. And houses burn down and are burglarized. Unless you plan on keeping your passwords in a fireproof safe, which isn’t exactly convenient—especially in our modern mobile world. In 2010, when this article was written, far fewer people did this much computing from a smartphone.
  - moron4hire 3y ago
    Times in the last 40 years that... My wallet has been stolen: 0 My house has burned down: 0 LastPass has been breached: 2+ LastPass' browser extension has caused me headaches: 9000+
    - predictabl3 3y ago
      This is like posting to HN that GoDaddy screwed you. It's nothing but a self tattle anymore. The number of times gpg has failed to decrypt one of my "pass" entries: 0.
      - moron4hire 3y ago
        Yeah, I'm such a loser, right? I didn't choose to use LastPass. It was foisted on me by my employer.
amelius 3y ago
What if the website doesn't allow the characters that you used in the table? What if there are multiple websites with the same 2nd and 3rd characters?
- sigmonsays 3y ago
  what if the password needs to be changed and previous ones can't be reused (You then must remember that)?
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    That's a use case for the good 'ole iterated number! Eventually you roll off the end of the history check, and can reuse the original on the next iteration. In my practical experience, I've never had a site where this happens with an account lock on bad password aggressive enough to lock me out before I find the iteration I'm on.
  - tjoff 3y ago
    Then for such sites you add the date, maybe in the form of [year][password][courter]. Probably modified somewhat so it isn't obvious what is is.
    - NikkiA 3y ago
      This reminds me of a time I was working for a company that motorola contracted, they sent us a system to install some software on, but forgot to set the root password to something shared with us. When told, they said 'sigh you'll have to ship it back to us so we can passwd it, then ship it back, even though our passwords are system specific and changed frequently - telling you the password would expose our password choice algorithm' We theorised it was probably "AlorotoMAug"
    - mgfist 3y ago
      A number of sites don't allow you to reuse iterations of old passwords (not sure exactly, but perhaps can't have more then 4 repeating chars). So you can't simply append, you have to change the actual password a considerable amount. Had a few websites like that, they were the bane of my existence until I got a password manager.
3littlefish 3y ago
Or just copy my mother and write them all on a post-in note stuck to the side of your monitor!
- quickthrower2 3y ago
  It is not too bad. Better than easy to guess passwords. The threat is friends/family and maybe a burglar. Backups are an issue though.
- JJMcJ 3y ago
  At home this isn't so bad. In the office, maybe not.
Zak 3y ago
I find it surprising this article doesn't mention password managers, though some comments do. They were already in widespread use in 2010.
- nvahalik 3y ago
  > They were already in widespread use in 2010. I'm interested in knowing the stats of this, but 1Password's first release was mid-2006. I know personally I started using 1Password in late 2008, 2009. But I'd argue even then that they were not "widespread" then and even now are not entirely widespread. (Unless you count Cloud Keychain). Arguably I think the more security conscious were using them, but even now, after several years, I STILL have to remind my wife about it and to put passwords in there.
  - mongol 3y ago
    I remember a colleague telling me about this, he used one late 2007. I thought "what unneccessary complexity, I store them encrypted with vim, much better". I know better now.
    - zlg_codes 3y ago
      What do you find better about a password manager compared to having total control and storing the passwords yourself in a simple text file? You still need a master password to access the information, and while there's less automation, there is a degree of simplicity and accessibility that is only paralleled by a built-in OS primitive for it. GPG and Vim are on just about everything. I would like to read write-ups of people who lost their password manager and were still able to use the encrypted storage and retrieve secrets with alternative tools. Being dependent on a specific tool for accessing dozens of sites feels like adding fragile infrastructure to my online identity. The only SPOF should be whether my body has access to an Internet connection! :) Granted, the quality of the encrypted text file is dependent on your discipline in managing it. However, it's simple and compatible with most *nix systems out of the box. Maybe part of it is how one interacts online, too? I try to reduce the number of accounts I have on the Web. Each one is another potential data leak risk. I might have different needs if I kept signing up to site after site, or needed to manage a brand or something else that's interaction- and account-heavy. Aside from my personal server, I probably have fewer than 10 or 12 passwords to remember or manage. If we add a zero, I see the use for a password manager.
amelius 3y ago
Better write a script that takes a master-password and site-name, and produces a hash that you can use as a password.
ethbr0 3y ago
Algorithmically generated passwords for different sites was a mind-blower. There are so many differentiation algorithms that are trivially runnable in your head. If most sites are salting and hashing passwords correctly (this is 2023...), then that drastically decreases your compromised credential blast radius. -- And it makes me sad that "store your passwords on dead-tree paper" became GOTO. It has serious weaknesses, but also serious strengths... especially in a post ~2005 always-on, networked-everything world. It turns the security requirement from electronic security into physical security (and appropriate recovery and disposal procedures). I'm not sure that's a bad trade-off these days. I don't hear about too many people having their password pickpocketed off them... Full disclosure: Never hopped on the password manager train, because I couldn't find a combination of (a) easy to use multi-device/OS/program, (b) open source, (c) secure from host / corporate ownership. If anyone has recommendations today, would love to revisit...
- dangitnotagain 3y ago
  Passwordsafe/password Gorilla(Apple) It’s been around for ages, I don’t know how well supported today, though it is what you asked for!
- hirundo 3y ago
  The KeePass unhosted ecosystem seems to fit your requirements. I recently switched to it from 1Password and am happy with it. I distribute the database to my various devices with (open source) Syncthing.
  - gochi 3y ago
    The distributed part is crucial, especially to avoid potential hardware failure. Happened to me, older machine ram (might be misremembering, that old machine had several parts replaced) failure made keypass unable to validate, claiming a corrupt database.
    - falcolas 3y ago
      A problem solved by a backup strategy, not a cloud service. I firmly believe you can't expect cloud services to do anything but serve up exactly what you give them. If you give them a corrupt database, they will happily serve you up a corrupted database.
devnull3 3y ago
Do not write your real password. Instead modify it in certain way which is easy to remember: E.g real password is "xB6fqmd$a90". Apply algo: swap 2nd and last char. So store it as: "x06fqmd$a9B" This algo should be easy to remember and there infinite ways to come up with your own algo. Even if your passwords are exposed there is additional protection. In other words you have your own simple symetric encryption with algo being the secret.
- hnbear 3y ago
  My Dad tried this when we first taught him to use an ATM and setup his PINs. He carefully wrote them in the back of his planner which he keeps in his pocket. Then he realized he needed extra security and added some extra digits before and after. Then promptly forgot which digits to remove and which to keep. His new approach is: 1. Pick a “famous” battle 2. Hand me a card and ask me to go to an ATM for him 3. Tell me the PIN is the battle of whatever 4. Yell at me for being an idiot for never having heard of the battle, let alone know the date.
  - devnull3 3y ago
    lol ... it seems it is same as forgetting password of your password manager. Frequent usage helps to retain the memory. Also, in my case my wife uses it so its two people remembering instead of one.
  - function_seven 3y ago
    “Dad I’m at the ATM but I forgot the PIN. What is it?” “You forgot?? I distinctly remember telling you: Battle of Hastings minus the length of the Thirty Years’ War, plus the Battle of Ipsos. C’mon kid, pay attention” “...” “Sigh. 1337. That’s the PIN”
sigmonsays 3y ago
this method fails hard for a couple reasons 1. password changes when previous can't be reused 2. restricted characters in password
0xbadcafebee 3y ago
Do not do this. It's just crappy security practice. Password managers give you versions & history (you need to rotate passwords occasionally), a TOTP generator+seed store, configurable password generator using a schemes of characters (some websites only allow specific characters), is encrypted at rest & in memory so it's more secure than a piece of paper in your wallet, is backed up online, and of course you only have to memorize one master password. (use BitWarden or 1Password, the rest have downsides/limitations) Besides, as XKCD made popular, long phrases of words are easier to remember than random passwords and contain plenty of entropy. Also, people aren't "good at securing their wallet". I'm sure as hell not gonna write my bank account password in my wallet and then walk around Barcelona, Athens, Paris or Rome.
- _Algernon_ 3y ago
  >Do not do this. It's just crappy security practice. >Password managers give you versions & history (you need to rotate passwords occasionally), a TOTP generator+seed store, configurable password generator using a schemes of characters (some websites only allow specific characters), is encrypted at rest & in memory so it's more secure than a piece of paper in your wallet, is backed up online, and of course you only have to memorize one master password. (use BitWarden or 1Password, the rest have downsides/limitations) This depends a lot on your threat model. You basically have three options for password managin, paper, cloud (eg. bitwarden), local (eg. keepass). Paper is mainly vulnerable to people in your life, government, etc. But your passwords can is safe from malware, digital exploits and so on. The vulnerabilities can be reduced by using a second factor that must be combined with the information in the notebook. The biggest problem with the paper approach is probably accidental loss. It's much more difficult to make backups. Cloud password managers have plenty of issues. I'll let the LastPass security incident section on Wikipedia speak for itself[0] Local password managers work, but there are plenty of potential vulnerabilities: Rogue developers, attacks on the development supply chain, local malware, etc. Some of this could be reduced by accessing passwords only in sandboxed OSes. However, nobody does that. In the end most people end up relying on not being a big target. These methods all work for most people, as long as they aren't the target of a nation state or other big actor. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LastPass#Security_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LastPass#Security_incidents
ComplexSystems 3y ago
What do you do if some website requires you to change your password for some reason? Of course you could use an alternate method - like reading vertically instead of diagonally for that one website - but now you need to remember how many passwords each site has made you generate.
- ethbr0 3y ago
  Iterate a pre/suffix number? I've never had a site do any substring historical matching.
  - yomlica8 3y ago
    > I've never had a site do any substring historical matching. Would this even be possible if the password is properly stored after salt+hash?
    - ethbr0 3y ago
      Good point. No. (Slurps more coffee)
    - augusto-moura 3y ago
      Technically yes, you could hash every substring of the new password and check them against the database. But is probably too much trouble for what is worth it
- pkulak 3y ago
  Or if your random selection happens to be all lowercase chars and the site flips out? Companies are too stupid about password requirements to make a scheme like this work, unfortunately. I've tried it, but a good password manager is what's actually worked in the real world.
choonway 3y ago
this is 2023, use KeepassX. If you're really paranoid, store it on a offline laptop. but if you want real security, use a security token (e.g. yubikey) or some other smartcard solution.
- baal80spam 3y ago
  > but if you want real security, use a security token (e.g. yubikey) or some other smartcard solution. In the past I thought about it but my head kept coming up with ridiculous scenarios like "what if your yubikey breaks, AND your backup yubikey breaks?!". I'll just keep using KeePassXC database (backed up in multiple places).
badcppdev 3y ago
Write down your usernames and account numbers as well. Today my banking app decided to 'forget' my login details. I have the account number available at home but I'm in the office today and so I can't log back into my account. So I can't check balances or approve payments (luckily I'm too busy to spend money)
- Mordisquitos 3y ago
  > Write down your usernames and account numbers as well. ...but not in the same notebook as your passwords! Ideally, don't even store them in two locations which could potentially be compromised simultaneously due to burglary or theft.
- vel0city 3y ago
  For banking/investing, I consider it a good idea to keep a few recent-ish physical printed statements on accounts which show all the details that might be useful in the future. Every few months I'll print off a statement and stash it in a file folder, I clean out the files every few years.
- alistairSH 3y ago
  Interesting. All my banking apps use the same login as the plain website. So, if the app forgot my login, I'd just re-enter it, pass MFA, and be done. Account #s not required.
warrenski 3y ago
The OP's technique reminds me somewhat of this site I stumbled on years ago: https://www.passwordcard.org/ https://www.passwordcard.org/
legitster 3y ago
Unless you are a high profile target, the risk of someone burglarizing your house without you knowing it and actually making use of a password book is virtually nil. Plus, you should really keep a physical copy of your passwords anyway in case something were to happen to you and your loved ones need access to your accounts, insurance, banking, photos, etc.
- Tagbert 3y ago
  When my brother died suddenly, recovering his passwords was a nightmare. Especially for accounts he managed for his wife’s dental business. Fortunately his son and I were able to guess his main password and a few others. We also found that he was reusing a small set of passwords. We finally were able to get into all of the relevant accounts and then wrote everything down and gave it to his wife. Not a fun process. We should all think about what happens after our deaths and how other people will deal with our messes.
  - Terr_ 3y ago
    When it comes to a Stash of Secrets to be only posthumously available, two approaches come to mind: 1. Some arrangement with a law-firm so that your Stash of Secrets will be delivered to your executor in the event of your death, where you trust they won't peek because of financial/legal relationships. 2. A way to unlock your Stash of Secrets that requires a certain portion of keys to be brought together, and you give out keys to different people. (People you trust enough not to all conspire together, but who also are unlikely to pass away the same time you do.) The latter, secret sharing[0], is obviously more algorithmically-interesting. The simplest approach would be two keys that XOR together to reveal the key needed to decrypt the Stash of Secrets. That said, don't let perfect be the enemy of good! At the very least proactively set up other people as "beneficiaries" at major institutions in the event of your death, and at least provide them a list of what institutions or accounts exist even if they don't have the credentials to control them now. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing
    - zlg_codes 3y ago
fortran77 3y ago
This is what I tell my 90 year old mother to do.
ptaffs 3y ago
This is great until you find a website which requires or disallows select special characters. With so many sites allowing a password reset via email, I wish we embraced the password-less login email "magic" link such as used by Slack.
sushibowl 3y ago
What I found interesting is go to the (ref) for his advice of writing down passwords, which is a 2005 blog post from Bruce Schneier. His advice seems obvious and correct even then, but just scroll through the comments and see the terrible password recommendations people were giving back then: > Why not just use a combination of words and numbers you can remember, and mix in some 7331 speak? I find this to be easy to do. Example Th0M42Y0rk3 > one recommendation I heard a while back was to mix in other information into the passwords when you write them down…like your phone number or driver’s license number or address, etc, etc – stuff you know very well already… > One of the most interesting ways that I’ve heard of to create strong passwords is to use a pattern of keystrokes from your keyboard, i.e. a circle of all the keys around the ‘F’ key for example, or an inverted V starting at the ‘x’ and ending at the ‘b’. > This is great timing… I just gave a security awareness presentation where this was one of the topics. My advise was to take a short phrase, do some creative (i.e. non predictable) substitutions and use that as your password. Then you can write down your phrase as a reminder without revealing the password. It seems like security experts spent a tremendous amount of effort to try and prevent people from writing down their passwords, then the world changed so much that "your attacker achieves physical access to your wallet and steals your passwords" was not a significant threat to most people any longer, and everyone had to reverse course. In my opinion, not having to remember passwords allows you to have so much more security against attacks that are actually likely to affect you (database leaks, rainbow table attacks, dictionary-based cracking methods, etc.) that it is well worth the trade-off of having to secure your piece of paper. A modern password manager is another good variant of this method.
zeroCalories 3y ago
I do something similar, but instead of writing it down I keep a flash drive in my wallet that is encrypted. It also contains copies of important documents. I backup the encrypted files in many locations. I still use the browser password manager though because I'm lazy. Fingers crossed.
blueridge 3y ago
Gabies system for remembering passwords https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mBnwHLMqtHWdgvhLyzcLtfrguBWTmDJ4Libn90__fW8/edit?pli=1#heading=h.kxu27ogi9251 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mBnwHLMqtHWdgvhLyzcLtfrg...
Vermyndax 3y ago
All I got out of this blog entry is that if I were a thief and I managed to steal this fellow's wallet, I would find the piece of paper in his wallet along with his ID card. I would then Google his name to find this blog post, which will helpfully allow me to decrypt his passwords.
- jdthedisciple 3y ago
  Huh? Where exactly did he reveal his actual rules for deriving passwords? The table itself won't be of any use.
Mordisquitos 3y ago
To be honest, I think that the method described in TFA is overkill and unnecessarily limiting. I would instead recommend simply writing your passwords down manually and keeping them (unlabelled) in a safe place. That is, unless there are specific reasons not to do so such as you cannot trust your live-in partner or housemates, or your threat model honestly includes a targeted burglary to your home. As long as you write down your passwords without the account name, without the title "Passwords", and ideally without even explicitly referencing what service they are the passwords for (as long as you don't need to keep track of too many of them), you are perfectly fine. And even of you do need to clarify which one is Google, which one is AWS, which one is banking, you can always come up with personal mnemonics that only you would understand how they relate to each account (e.g. "The one with the hug from Paul", "Green beans", "The one that tried to get away", etc.). A burglar will almost certainly not even bother taking a bit of paper or notebook with random gibberish, and even if they do they won't have the slightest inclination to try to hack into your accounts (which accounts? they are not in the notebook!). And if you're still worried about this hypothetical scenario, just agree with yourself to "salt" every password you write down by concatenating for instance 3 irrelevant random characters (or words, if using passphrases) on one end. If somebody breaking into your home, stealing your notebook, finding your Google account handle, and trying every single one of the j39yb1!L8q#4$1-like strings they found in it, and trying every version after removing the first/last n characters is a more realistic scenario than losing access to your digitally-stores passwords you live a much more exiciting life than most HN commenters.
ulrischa 3y ago
Security guys would say: Security by obscurity. But I like the approach
dunham 3y ago
I did this for a while (with a different algorithm for picking the password off of the table). It gets inconvenient when a site makes you change your password.
Aerbil313 3y ago
I'm using an algorithmically generated password. It's long, secure, and I need not remember it. I use random batter-horse-staple-whatever passwords (my own variety of casing and spacing) only in the most important things, like bank or government account and I write them down.
- oskarw85 3y ago
  That's insecure because if the password leaks from any site it could be trivially used by attacker in other sites. And your algorithm is not safe at all because password crackers could guess your algo and generate millions of its variations.
  - GoblinSlayer 3y ago
    It's called deterministic password manager. echo QGiruyN3DCTTUN/OoRdP9WDJh+E amazon|md5sum produces 7c7a50469cf6c97d541956ad06ae0add echo QGiruyN3DCTTUN/OoRdP9WDJh+E facebook|md5sum produces f6bf0d9e5d5b94e095355f4902232084 Feel free to guess the QGiruyN3DCTTUN/OoRdP9WDJh+E part from the output.
  - Aerbil313 3y ago
    No, I designed it so that the hostname (e.g. Amazon) is not obvious at all from the resulting password. It's all mixed up with unrelated letters and the order of the hostname's letters are mixed up as well.
normalaccess 3y ago
There is a slightly more powerful approach developed by Steve Gibson (from the security now podcast) called "Off the Grid" if anyone is interested. It has a few more features baked in and a nice generator to play with. I highly recommend giving it a look. https://www.grc.com/offthegrid.htm https://www.grc.com/offthegrid.htm
- conkeisterdoor 3y ago
  This is super cool, I love it and am going to give it a try. Thanks for sharing!
baal80spam 3y ago
Another reason for using a password manager is the fact of keyboard-related attacks getting more widespread. Case in point: A Practical Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Keyboards (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.01074.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.01074.pdf)
FredPret 3y ago
Here’s how most people do it: https://youtu.be/aHaBH4LqGsI https://youtu.be/aHaBH4LqGsI
bigmofo 3y ago
This looks to be the same as https://www.grc.com/offthegrid.htm https://www.grc.com/offthegrid.htm (pointed to by normal access). I am not sure how this works, when say in the example one's example.com password has been breached and example.com is forcing one to rotate the password. Then it looks like one has to have two sheets. One for all current passwords and a second sheet just for example.com. Am I missing something? (Does one rotate all of one's passwords so that one can use a single sheet? Seems time consuming to rotate all passwords.)
- normalaccess 3y ago
  The solution to this is to add a incrementing number to the domain on a separate list in some fashion. So for example instead of website.com you would use website.com0. If there is a need to generate an new password for the same site you increment the number (website.com1). Since the fist stage of the Off The Grid system is very much like a hash you will end up with a completely different password. If you want to be REALLY secure about the process to protect from someone finding your grid and list you could run the process twice. Once to create a "hash" of the the domain name then again to generate the password. Sense this is a one way function no one would have a clue what sites you are using. Domain: website.com > Hash of name: Ght5Fr2\-0 (this is where you append the number) > Password: kHu8HBe# Steve gives the full breakdown of the process here: https://www.grc.com/otg/goals.htm https://www.grc.com/otg/goals.htm I hope this makes sense.
  - bigmofo 3y ago
    I thought of that (adding a number) when posting, but then one has to remember that number...
groby_b 3y ago
Or... you could just use a password manager. With a few high-value keywords (your email - it's universal password access for most of us!) kept out of it. If you've need additional security (or the feeling thereof), keep it on an IronKey If you think that's not enough because some government or criminal organization is after you - hire somebody who understands security deeply, don't take advice from the Internet :) (Also, threat model: unless you have state-like resources, a state-like attacker will win every time if they want to win. They just don't care about most of us)
syllablehq 3y ago
It makes me so sad that it's 2023 and we haven't fixed passwords. There's no need for any of this. Your email account (+ multi-factor as desired) will always be the weak link, so just reduce everything to that. Get rid of passwords. Create a new standard that falls back to passwords to work with legacy systems, but going forward will enable a password keepers to just authenticate you with a generated random password saved encrypted to your cookies that the user never even has to see. Then reset it as needed through your email (+ multi-factor as desired) as needed. User-visible passwords should die. Technologists should to get un-stuck from living in the current password paradigm. I've been wanting to make this rant a blog post but haven't gotten around to it - esp because I know it's been written about a million times already.
- deleted 3y ago
  [deleted]
- Longhanks 3y ago
  I absolutely despise everything in this comment. I have a user name and I know the associated password, let me in. Leave me alone with your proprietary authenticators that will lock me out the moment I lose my phone or Google/MS just _decide_ they feel like locking me out. GitHub force-disabling password authentication for git push has actively made me contribute less to GitHub-hosted projects. And when I really feel it, I just create a full access authentication token anyway and copy the contents to the device. Great. This is the 90‘s "password on a sticky note at the desk" all over again, just even more cumbersome and even less secure. Great job, everyone. And no, passkeys/webauthn/vendor lock in #1864 won’t fix this.
  - syllablehq 3y ago
    I understand where you're coming from, and if you really want to have a username and password - yes, you should be let in. You should always be able to manually authenticate if you really want to. But I'm arguing that's it's time to automate and hide that process from the user experience. (multi-factor auth is another topic... let's put that aside for now..) But the reality is that memorizable passwords simply does not scale in any world where we have to authenticate with so many services. It's time to shift paradigms. When you take a step back, it's clear that we're trying to shim a new password keeper system into an old password input field paradigm, and it makes no sense and it's holding us back. Agreed that no one should be forcing a proprietary authenticator service on anyone. On the contrary, to avoid that, we need an open standard that is cross-compatible between proprietary services. The open standard should make it easy for any browser, password keeper, multi-factor auth system etc to speak the same language and "just work" instead of hacking around with auto-filling password input fields for no reason. We're so stuck in an old way of thinking that we can't see that the password input field is vestigial and is only making everyone's experience worse.
tracker1 3y ago
Then twitter.com becomes X, and you're doomed. Seriously though, I've setup accounts on Site foo, but then bar buys them, and two years later it's on Baz.com, and if I don't remember the switch(es) that woudld/could suck. I just use Bitwarden for everything but my system login(s) and bitwarden passphrase, which I tend to keep around 20 chars, and multiple words.

92 points by smartmic 3y ago

https://pocketmod.com/ https://pocketmod.com/ has this exact password system. It's under "Misc/Passwords" and shows a grid of random characters you can seed.

deleted 3y ago

[deleted]

gostsamo 3y ago

Don't use fancy combinations. Word phrases are even more random and much easier to remember. E.G. "touch-some-grass" is rander longer than any recommended minimum and hardly could be connected to any website.

pmw 3y ago
One of my toy projects is https://phrase.shop https://phrase.shop -- a small webapp that generates grammatically correct phrases that are both random and memorizable.
skerit 3y ago
Exactly, using phrases is so much nicer and better in every way. It annoys me when sites demand a password should have a special character or upper case letter in it. Or even worse: a max length.
- jug 3y ago
  Max lengths are so sketchy because this makes it more likely the crazy guys are actually storing your password rather than the fixed size hash.
  - ellisv 3y ago
    I remember my annoyance when I banked with Wells Fargo and they had a maximum password length of something like 12 or 16 characters. Later I found out they would lowercase the password before sending it to the server.
  - AtNightWeCode 3y ago
    Passwords are sent to the server though in most cases. So there must be some limit.
    - mcny 3y ago
      What should this limit be? Personally, I think the limit should be nothing smaller than a thousand characters. Or even allowing something like a hundred characters or more would be better. I remember at some point Hotmail had a maximum length limit of sixteen characters. https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/secret-microsoft-policy-limited-hotmail-passwords-to-16-characters/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2012/09/secre...
      - falcolas 3y ago
        100Kb is a perfectly reasonable length IMO. Only takes seconds to send even over terrible links.
        iLoveOncall 3y ago
        It becomes problematic when it needs to be hashed, you can essentially DDOS servers by sending extremely long passwords that need to be hashed.
        falcolas 3y ago
        Realistically speaking, the hash would be your smallest problem if you're being DDoSed. Bcrypt for example would require at most ~6.4Mb of memory to do the hash, and more realistically only the 100k plus some constant. And modern CPUs are pretty efficient at doing the encryption steps, meaning little additional load for encrypting a larger value.
        AtNightWeCode 3y ago
        [flagged]
  - bradyd 3y ago
    Some of the password hashing algorithms have maximum input lengths. For example bcrypt only allows up to a 72 byte string. https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Bcrypt
- Zambyte 3y ago
  Just use that kind of passphrase for your password manager master password, and let it generate valid passwords for you.
- NikkiA 3y ago
  Until you hit a site that silently drops everything after the first space in your, now 5-6 character, pass phrase.
- JohnFen 3y ago
  > using phrases is so much nicer and better in every way. Except for with me. I find phrases much more difficult to remember and use than passwords, personally. Although in either case, I'll need to have the ones I don't use daily somewhere where I can look them up, because there's no chance I'll remember them.
- tracker1 3y ago
  My password manager is generally set to 30 random characters with all options. Max lengths bug the crap out of me, or limited character options... I mean, just use utf8 + normalization before hashing. Min-length should be the only requirement (if that). If I want to write in morse-code using dots and dashes, let me (I don't but had a friend that used to do that). Actually, the only thing worse, is not being able to paste into the password field(s)... you create a long random password, and now you can't paste it... great.
teddyh 3y ago
Your example is misleading; “touch-some-grass” is hardly random. “horse-battery-staple-correct" is presumably randomly chosen, and is therefore a better example phrase.
- cubefox 3y ago
  I'm not sure how safe this is against dictionary attacks. And it's still not overly easy to remember.
  - ndriscoll 3y ago
    It's 100% safe from dictionary attacks. You can even make it grammatically correct. Just choose something like adjective-noun-adverb-transitive_verb-adjective-noun. If you choose each of six words randomly from a list of the 2k most common words with that part of speech, you get 66 bits of entropy, which is slightly more entropy than a random 11 character alphanumeric password with upper and lower case, but vastly easier to remember, type, and say out loud if you need to tell someone. Think of the words as just a view/rendering of a random bit string. You generate random numbers and then use that to index into your word lists to display those numbers. If you use an injective function for your view, you can choose it to have whatever "nice" (for humans) properties you want (e.g. grammatical validity), and no entropy will be lost (or gained).
- gostsamo 3y ago
  Yep, lazy example, but even grammatically correct sentences are a lot. The idea though is for the passphrase to be something invoking a distinct image for the owner and I'm coming from a vacation. :)
  - teddyh 3y ago
    Yes, it’s all fine if it is actually randomly chosen, with enough bits: <https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14970652 https://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=14970652>
pajko 3y ago
There's an xkxd for this: https://xkcd.com/936/ https://xkcd.com/936/ And yet our infrastructure demands so obscure passwords I keep forgetting them all the time.
- Eric_WVGG 3y ago
  There's an understated bonus to "correct horse battery staple" passwords — they're easier to type on iPhone and Android keyboards. So besides being of questionable security benefits, 0bScur3 passwords also bonk that advantage of nice-long-easy-to-remember passwords.
  - jamesponddotco 3y ago
    Or on a PS5, Nintendo Switch, and whatnot. So much easier to type and remember.
    - tracker1 3y ago
      Yeah, streaming accounts are probably the only ones in my password manager that aren't randomly generated for that reason. "Gimme movies now!" (not my actual passphrase)
      - jamesponddotco 3y ago
        Mine are still randomly generated, but using the diceware method. Best of both worlds, really.
- ckozlowski 3y ago
  There was an arstechnica article a while back with a password cracker (person) who had an answer for this: https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/how-crackers-make-minced-meat-out-of-your-passwords/ https://arstechnica.com/information-technology/2013/05/how-c... "The specific type of hybrid attack that cracked that password is known as a combinator attack. It combines each word in a dictionary with every other word in the dictionary. Because these attacks are capable of generating a huge number of guesses—the square of the number of words in the dict—crackers often work with smaller word lists or simply terminate a run in progress once things start slowing down. Other times, they combine words from one big dictionary with words from a smaller one. Steube was able to crack "momof3g8kids" because he had "momof3g" in his 111 million dict and "8kids" in a smaller dict. "The combinator attack got it! It's cool," he said. Then referring to the oft-cited xkcd comic, he added: "This is an answer to the batteryhorsestaple thing."" The entropy factors I see listed as in the xkcd comic are only valid if the cracking entity is doing a brute force attack. But skilled attacks won't be doing this. There's still nothing that beats a truly random string. But as others pointed out, it's also the most inconvenient to try to manage and remember.
ipython 3y ago
But with transformer models it would probably be trivial to predict the top 10 next words if your passphrase is grammatically correct. Interesting password cracker idea …
- ndriscoll 3y ago
  Done correctly, you choose words (uniformly) randomly from some dictionary, so the best a model can do is predict that all words from the dictionary are equally likely. All a model does is approximate probabilitly distributions, but the distribution isn't a secret; it's uniform. The dictionary doesn't need to be a secret either. The strength comes from the dictionary size and number of words.
  - ipython 3y ago
    But the parent comment I responded to used the example passphrase “touch-some-grass” which is most definitely not a uniform distribution of words. Yes, done correctly this is secure.
jamesponddotco 3y ago
For anyone looking for a dictionary for diceware passwords (or passphrases, or whatever you call them), I have one available over here[1] with over 23000 words with a minimum of 3 characters. [1] https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/acopw-go/tree/trunk/item/words/word-list.txt https://git.sr.ht/~jamesponddotco/acopw-go/tree/trunk/item/w...
- Verdex 3y ago
  There also exists a few word lists online in the public domain. For example, project gutenberg has Moby Word Lists by Grady Ward which is supposedly in the public domain (at least for the USA). https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3201 https://www.gutenberg.org/ebooks/3201 https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3201/files/ https://www.gutenberg.org/files/3201/files/ Last time I looked into it, there were a few different options floating around for word lists.
pkulak 3y ago
And 1 out of 100 websites will accept that password, unfortunately.
- mgfist 3y ago
  You can just append whatever character requirements they have. So instead of "correcthorsebatterystaple", you can do "CorrectHorseBatteryStaple123!". Should meet most requirements. Although I just use a password manager but to each their own.
  - WorldMaker 3y ago
    Also, spaces sometimes count as "special character" requirements, so sometimes just "sentence form" passes: "Correct, 1 horse battery staple!"

EdTechAndrew 3y ago

Question for security experts: Is this really that much more secure than a local only password manager, like KeePass? It is fun, but the inconvenience of it feels like its not worth the benefits.

Agent766 3y ago
I don't think it is. I recommend using a password manager that supports hardware 2fa. One of the main issues with the proposed paper mechanism are that it doesn't support rotating passwords individually. Another is sites that share second and third characters would share a password.
lobsterthief 3y ago
Also, wallets are commonly lost and stolen. And houses burn down and are burglarized. Unless you plan on keeping your passwords in a fireproof safe, which isn’t exactly convenient—especially in our modern mobile world. In 2010, when this article was written, far fewer people did this much computing from a smartphone.
- moron4hire 3y ago
  Times in the last 40 years that... My wallet has been stolen: 0 My house has burned down: 0 LastPass has been breached: 2+ LastPass' browser extension has caused me headaches: 9000+
  - predictabl3 3y ago
    This is like posting to HN that GoDaddy screwed you. It's nothing but a self tattle anymore. The number of times gpg has failed to decrypt one of my "pass" entries: 0.
    - moron4hire 3y ago
      Yeah, I'm such a loser, right? I didn't choose to use LastPass. It was foisted on me by my employer.

amelius 3y ago

What if the website doesn't allow the characters that you used in the table? What if there are multiple websites with the same 2nd and 3rd characters?

sigmonsays 3y ago
what if the password needs to be changed and previous ones can't be reused (You then must remember that)?
- ethbr0 3y ago
  That's a use case for the good 'ole iterated number! Eventually you roll off the end of the history check, and can reuse the original on the next iteration. In my practical experience, I've never had a site where this happens with an account lock on bad password aggressive enough to lock me out before I find the iteration I'm on.
- tjoff 3y ago
  Then for such sites you add the date, maybe in the form of [year][password][courter]. Probably modified somewhat so it isn't obvious what is is.
  - NikkiA 3y ago
    This reminds me of a time I was working for a company that motorola contracted, they sent us a system to install some software on, but forgot to set the root password to something shared with us. When told, they said 'sigh you'll have to ship it back to us so we can passwd it, then ship it back, even though our passwords are system specific and changed frequently - telling you the password would expose our password choice algorithm' We theorised it was probably "AlorotoMAug"
  - mgfist 3y ago
    A number of sites don't allow you to reuse iterations of old passwords (not sure exactly, but perhaps can't have more then 4 repeating chars). So you can't simply append, you have to change the actual password a considerable amount. Had a few websites like that, they were the bane of my existence until I got a password manager.

3littlefish 3y ago

Or just copy my mother and write them all on a post-in note stuck to the side of your monitor!

quickthrower2 3y ago
It is not too bad. Better than easy to guess passwords. The threat is friends/family and maybe a burglar. Backups are an issue though.
JJMcJ 3y ago
At home this isn't so bad. In the office, maybe not.

Zak 3y ago

I find it surprising this article doesn't mention password managers, though some comments do. They were already in widespread use in 2010.

nvahalik 3y ago
> They were already in widespread use in 2010. I'm interested in knowing the stats of this, but 1Password's first release was mid-2006. I know personally I started using 1Password in late 2008, 2009. But I'd argue even then that they were not "widespread" then and even now are not entirely widespread. (Unless you count Cloud Keychain). Arguably I think the more security conscious were using them, but even now, after several years, I STILL have to remind my wife about it and to put passwords in there.
- mongol 3y ago
  I remember a colleague telling me about this, he used one late 2007. I thought "what unneccessary complexity, I store them encrypted with vim, much better". I know better now.
  - zlg_codes 3y ago
    What do you find better about a password manager compared to having total control and storing the passwords yourself in a simple text file? You still need a master password to access the information, and while there's less automation, there is a degree of simplicity and accessibility that is only paralleled by a built-in OS primitive for it. GPG and Vim are on just about everything. I would like to read write-ups of people who lost their password manager and were still able to use the encrypted storage and retrieve secrets with alternative tools. Being dependent on a specific tool for accessing dozens of sites feels like adding fragile infrastructure to my online identity. The only SPOF should be whether my body has access to an Internet connection! :) Granted, the quality of the encrypted text file is dependent on your discipline in managing it. However, it's simple and compatible with most *nix systems out of the box. Maybe part of it is how one interacts online, too? I try to reduce the number of accounts I have on the Web. Each one is another potential data leak risk. I might have different needs if I kept signing up to site after site, or needed to manage a brand or something else that's interaction- and account-heavy. Aside from my personal server, I probably have fewer than 10 or 12 passwords to remember or manage. If we add a zero, I see the use for a password manager.

amelius 3y ago

Better write a script that takes a master-password and site-name, and produces a hash that you can use as a password.

ethbr0 3y ago

Algorithmically generated passwords for different sites was a mind-blower. There are so many differentiation algorithms that are trivially runnable in your head. If most sites are salting and hashing passwords correctly (this is 2023...), then that drastically decreases your compromised credential blast radius. -- And it makes me sad that "store your passwords on dead-tree paper" became GOTO. It has serious weaknesses, but also serious strengths... especially in a post ~2005 always-on, networked-everything world. It turns the security requirement from electronic security into physical security (and appropriate recovery and disposal procedures). I'm not sure that's a bad trade-off these days. I don't hear about too many people having their password pickpocketed off them... Full disclosure: Never hopped on the password manager train, because I couldn't find a combination of (a) easy to use multi-device/OS/program, (b) open source, (c) secure from host / corporate ownership. If anyone has recommendations today, would love to revisit...

dangitnotagain 3y ago
Passwordsafe/password Gorilla(Apple) It’s been around for ages, I don’t know how well supported today, though it is what you asked for!
hirundo 3y ago
The KeePass unhosted ecosystem seems to fit your requirements. I recently switched to it from 1Password and am happy with it. I distribute the database to my various devices with (open source) Syncthing.
- gochi 3y ago
  The distributed part is crucial, especially to avoid potential hardware failure. Happened to me, older machine ram (might be misremembering, that old machine had several parts replaced) failure made keypass unable to validate, claiming a corrupt database.
  - falcolas 3y ago
    A problem solved by a backup strategy, not a cloud service. I firmly believe you can't expect cloud services to do anything but serve up exactly what you give them. If you give them a corrupt database, they will happily serve you up a corrupted database.

devnull3 3y ago

Do not write your real password. Instead modify it in certain way which is easy to remember: E.g real password is "xB6fqmd$a90". Apply algo: swap 2nd and last char. So store it as: "x06fqmd$a9B" This algo should be easy to remember and there infinite ways to come up with your own algo. Even if your passwords are exposed there is additional protection. In other words you have your own simple symetric encryption with algo being the secret.

hnbear 3y ago
My Dad tried this when we first taught him to use an ATM and setup his PINs. He carefully wrote them in the back of his planner which he keeps in his pocket. Then he realized he needed extra security and added some extra digits before and after. Then promptly forgot which digits to remove and which to keep. His new approach is: 1. Pick a “famous” battle 2. Hand me a card and ask me to go to an ATM for him 3. Tell me the PIN is the battle of whatever 4. Yell at me for being an idiot for never having heard of the battle, let alone know the date.
- devnull3 3y ago
  lol ... it seems it is same as forgetting password of your password manager. Frequent usage helps to retain the memory. Also, in my case my wife uses it so its two people remembering instead of one.
- function_seven 3y ago
  “Dad I’m at the ATM but I forgot the PIN. What is it?” “You forgot?? I distinctly remember telling you: Battle of Hastings minus the length of the Thirty Years’ War, plus the Battle of Ipsos. C’mon kid, pay attention” “...” “Sigh. 1337. That’s the PIN”

sigmonsays 3y ago

this method fails hard for a couple reasons 1. password changes when previous can't be reused 2. restricted characters in password

0xbadcafebee 3y ago

Do not do this. It's just crappy security practice. Password managers give you versions & history (you need to rotate passwords occasionally), a TOTP generator+seed store, configurable password generator using a schemes of characters (some websites only allow specific characters), is encrypted at rest & in memory so it's more secure than a piece of paper in your wallet, is backed up online, and of course you only have to memorize one master password. (use BitWarden or 1Password, the rest have downsides/limitations) Besides, as XKCD made popular, long phrases of words are easier to remember than random passwords and contain plenty of entropy. Also, people aren't "good at securing their wallet". I'm sure as hell not gonna write my bank account password in my wallet and then walk around Barcelona, Athens, Paris or Rome.

_Algernon_ 3y ago
>Do not do this. It's just crappy security practice. >Password managers give you versions & history (you need to rotate passwords occasionally), a TOTP generator+seed store, configurable password generator using a schemes of characters (some websites only allow specific characters), is encrypted at rest & in memory so it's more secure than a piece of paper in your wallet, is backed up online, and of course you only have to memorize one master password. (use BitWarden or 1Password, the rest have downsides/limitations) This depends a lot on your threat model. You basically have three options for password managin, paper, cloud (eg. bitwarden), local (eg. keepass). Paper is mainly vulnerable to people in your life, government, etc. But your passwords can is safe from malware, digital exploits and so on. The vulnerabilities can be reduced by using a second factor that must be combined with the information in the notebook. The biggest problem with the paper approach is probably accidental loss. It's much more difficult to make backups. Cloud password managers have plenty of issues. I'll let the LastPass security incident section on Wikipedia speak for itself[0] Local password managers work, but there are plenty of potential vulnerabilities: Rogue developers, attacks on the development supply chain, local malware, etc. Some of this could be reduced by accessing passwords only in sandboxed OSes. However, nobody does that. In the end most people end up relying on not being a big target. These methods all work for most people, as long as they aren't the target of a nation state or other big actor. [0]: https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LastPass#Security_incidents https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/LastPass#Security_incidents

ComplexSystems 3y ago

What do you do if some website requires you to change your password for some reason? Of course you could use an alternate method - like reading vertically instead of diagonally for that one website - but now you need to remember how many passwords each site has made you generate.

ethbr0 3y ago
Iterate a pre/suffix number? I've never had a site do any substring historical matching.
- yomlica8 3y ago
  > I've never had a site do any substring historical matching. Would this even be possible if the password is properly stored after salt+hash?
  - ethbr0 3y ago
    Good point. No. (Slurps more coffee)
  - augusto-moura 3y ago
    Technically yes, you could hash every substring of the new password and check them against the database. But is probably too much trouble for what is worth it
pkulak 3y ago
Or if your random selection happens to be all lowercase chars and the site flips out? Companies are too stupid about password requirements to make a scheme like this work, unfortunately. I've tried it, but a good password manager is what's actually worked in the real world.

choonway 3y ago

this is 2023, use KeepassX. If you're really paranoid, store it on a offline laptop. but if you want real security, use a security token (e.g. yubikey) or some other smartcard solution.

baal80spam 3y ago
> but if you want real security, use a security token (e.g. yubikey) or some other smartcard solution. In the past I thought about it but my head kept coming up with ridiculous scenarios like "what if your yubikey breaks, AND your backup yubikey breaks?!". I'll just keep using KeePassXC database (backed up in multiple places).

badcppdev 3y ago

Write down your usernames and account numbers as well. Today my banking app decided to 'forget' my login details. I have the account number available at home but I'm in the office today and so I can't log back into my account. So I can't check balances or approve payments (luckily I'm too busy to spend money)

Mordisquitos 3y ago
> Write down your usernames and account numbers as well. ...but not in the same notebook as your passwords! Ideally, don't even store them in two locations which could potentially be compromised simultaneously due to burglary or theft.
vel0city 3y ago
For banking/investing, I consider it a good idea to keep a few recent-ish physical printed statements on accounts which show all the details that might be useful in the future. Every few months I'll print off a statement and stash it in a file folder, I clean out the files every few years.
alistairSH 3y ago
Interesting. All my banking apps use the same login as the plain website. So, if the app forgot my login, I'd just re-enter it, pass MFA, and be done. Account #s not required.

warrenski 3y ago

The OP's technique reminds me somewhat of this site I stumbled on years ago: https://www.passwordcard.org/ https://www.passwordcard.org/

legitster 3y ago

Unless you are a high profile target, the risk of someone burglarizing your house without you knowing it and actually making use of a password book is virtually nil. Plus, you should really keep a physical copy of your passwords anyway in case something were to happen to you and your loved ones need access to your accounts, insurance, banking, photos, etc.

Tagbert 3y ago
When my brother died suddenly, recovering his passwords was a nightmare. Especially for accounts he managed for his wife’s dental business. Fortunately his son and I were able to guess his main password and a few others. We also found that he was reusing a small set of passwords. We finally were able to get into all of the relevant accounts and then wrote everything down and gave it to his wife. Not a fun process. We should all think about what happens after our deaths and how other people will deal with our messes.
- Terr_ 3y ago
  When it comes to a Stash of Secrets to be only posthumously available, two approaches come to mind: 1. Some arrangement with a law-firm so that your Stash of Secrets will be delivered to your executor in the event of your death, where you trust they won't peek because of financial/legal relationships. 2. A way to unlock your Stash of Secrets that requires a certain portion of keys to be brought together, and you give out keys to different people. (People you trust enough not to all conspire together, but who also are unlikely to pass away the same time you do.) The latter, secret sharing[0], is obviously more algorithmically-interesting. The simplest approach would be two keys that XOR together to reveal the key needed to decrypt the Stash of Secrets. That said, don't let perfect be the enemy of good! At the very least proactively set up other people as "beneficiaries" at major institutions in the event of your death, and at least provide them a list of what institutions or accounts exist even if they don't have the credentials to control them now. [0] https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing https://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Secret_sharing
  - zlg_codes 3y ago

fortran77 3y ago

This is what I tell my 90 year old mother to do.

ptaffs 3y ago

This is great until you find a website which requires or disallows select special characters. With so many sites allowing a password reset via email, I wish we embraced the password-less login email "magic" link such as used by Slack.

sushibowl 3y ago

What I found interesting is go to the (ref) for his advice of writing down passwords, which is a 2005 blog post from Bruce Schneier. His advice seems obvious and correct even then, but just scroll through the comments and see the terrible password recommendations people were giving back then: > Why not just use a combination of words and numbers you can remember, and mix in some 7331 speak? I find this to be easy to do. Example Th0M42Y0rk3 > one recommendation I heard a while back was to mix in other information into the passwords when you write them down…like your phone number or driver’s license number or address, etc, etc – stuff you know very well already… > One of the most interesting ways that I’ve heard of to create strong passwords is to use a pattern of keystrokes from your keyboard, i.e. a circle of all the keys around the ‘F’ key for example, or an inverted V starting at the ‘x’ and ending at the ‘b’. > This is great timing… I just gave a security awareness presentation where this was one of the topics. My advise was to take a short phrase, do some creative (i.e. non predictable) substitutions and use that as your password. Then you can write down your phrase as a reminder without revealing the password. It seems like security experts spent a tremendous amount of effort to try and prevent people from writing down their passwords, then the world changed so much that "your attacker achieves physical access to your wallet and steals your passwords" was not a significant threat to most people any longer, and everyone had to reverse course. In my opinion, not having to remember passwords allows you to have so much more security against attacks that are actually likely to affect you (database leaks, rainbow table attacks, dictionary-based cracking methods, etc.) that it is well worth the trade-off of having to secure your piece of paper. A modern password manager is another good variant of this method.

zeroCalories 3y ago

I do something similar, but instead of writing it down I keep a flash drive in my wallet that is encrypted. It also contains copies of important documents. I backup the encrypted files in many locations. I still use the browser password manager though because I'm lazy. Fingers crossed.

blueridge 3y ago

Gabies system for remembering passwords https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mBnwHLMqtHWdgvhLyzcLtfrguBWTmDJ4Libn90__fW8/edit?pli=1#heading=h.kxu27ogi9251 https://docs.google.com/document/d/1mBnwHLMqtHWdgvhLyzcLtfrg...

Vermyndax 3y ago

All I got out of this blog entry is that if I were a thief and I managed to steal this fellow's wallet, I would find the piece of paper in his wallet along with his ID card. I would then Google his name to find this blog post, which will helpfully allow me to decrypt his passwords.

jdthedisciple 3y ago
Huh? Where exactly did he reveal his actual rules for deriving passwords? The table itself won't be of any use.

Mordisquitos 3y ago

To be honest, I think that the method described in TFA is overkill and unnecessarily limiting. I would instead recommend simply writing your passwords down manually and keeping them (unlabelled) in a safe place. That is, unless there are specific reasons not to do so such as you cannot trust your live-in partner or housemates, or your threat model honestly includes a targeted burglary to your home. As long as you write down your passwords without the account name, without the title "Passwords", and ideally without even explicitly referencing what service they are the passwords for (as long as you don't need to keep track of too many of them), you are perfectly fine. And even of you do need to clarify which one is Google, which one is AWS, which one is banking, you can always come up with personal mnemonics that only you would understand how they relate to each account (e.g. "The one with the hug from Paul", "Green beans", "The one that tried to get away", etc.). A burglar will almost certainly not even bother taking a bit of paper or notebook with random gibberish, and even if they do they won't have the slightest inclination to try to hack into your accounts (which accounts? they are not in the notebook!). And if you're still worried about this hypothetical scenario, just agree with yourself to "salt" every password you write down by concatenating for instance 3 irrelevant random characters (or words, if using passphrases) on one end. If somebody breaking into your home, stealing your notebook, finding your Google account handle, and trying every single one of the j39yb1!L8q#4$1-like strings they found in it, and trying every version after removing the first/last n characters is a more realistic scenario than losing access to your digitally-stores passwords you live a much more exiciting life than most HN commenters.

ulrischa 3y ago

Security guys would say: Security by obscurity. But I like the approach

dunham 3y ago

I did this for a while (with a different algorithm for picking the password off of the table). It gets inconvenient when a site makes you change your password.

Aerbil313 3y ago

I'm using an algorithmically generated password. It's long, secure, and I need not remember it. I use random batter-horse-staple-whatever passwords (my own variety of casing and spacing) only in the most important things, like bank or government account and I write them down.

oskarw85 3y ago
That's insecure because if the password leaks from any site it could be trivially used by attacker in other sites. And your algorithm is not safe at all because password crackers could guess your algo and generate millions of its variations.
- GoblinSlayer 3y ago
  It's called deterministic password manager. echo QGiruyN3DCTTUN/OoRdP9WDJh+E amazon|md5sum produces 7c7a50469cf6c97d541956ad06ae0add echo QGiruyN3DCTTUN/OoRdP9WDJh+E facebook|md5sum produces f6bf0d9e5d5b94e095355f4902232084 Feel free to guess the QGiruyN3DCTTUN/OoRdP9WDJh+E part from the output.
- Aerbil313 3y ago
  No, I designed it so that the hostname (e.g. Amazon) is not obvious at all from the resulting password. It's all mixed up with unrelated letters and the order of the hostname's letters are mixed up as well.

normalaccess 3y ago

There is a slightly more powerful approach developed by Steve Gibson (from the security now podcast) called "Off the Grid" if anyone is interested. It has a few more features baked in and a nice generator to play with. I highly recommend giving it a look. https://www.grc.com/offthegrid.htm https://www.grc.com/offthegrid.htm

conkeisterdoor 3y ago
This is super cool, I love it and am going to give it a try. Thanks for sharing!

baal80spam 3y ago

Another reason for using a password manager is the fact of keyboard-related attacks getting more widespread. Case in point: A Practical Deep Learning-Based Acoustic Side Channel Attack on Keyboards (https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.01074.pdf https://arxiv.org/pdf/2308.01074.pdf)

FredPret 3y ago

Here’s how most people do it: https://youtu.be/aHaBH4LqGsI https://youtu.be/aHaBH4LqGsI

bigmofo 3y ago

This looks to be the same as https://www.grc.com/offthegrid.htm https://www.grc.com/offthegrid.htm (pointed to by normal access). I am not sure how this works, when say in the example one's example.com password has been breached and example.com is forcing one to rotate the password. Then it looks like one has to have two sheets. One for all current passwords and a second sheet just for example.com. Am I missing something? (Does one rotate all of one's passwords so that one can use a single sheet? Seems time consuming to rotate all passwords.)

normalaccess 3y ago
The solution to this is to add a incrementing number to the domain on a separate list in some fashion. So for example instead of website.com you would use website.com0. If there is a need to generate an new password for the same site you increment the number (website.com1). Since the fist stage of the Off The Grid system is very much like a hash you will end up with a completely different password. If you want to be REALLY secure about the process to protect from someone finding your grid and list you could run the process twice. Once to create a "hash" of the the domain name then again to generate the password. Sense this is a one way function no one would have a clue what sites you are using. Domain: website.com > Hash of name: Ght5Fr2\-0 (this is where you append the number) > Password: kHu8HBe# Steve gives the full breakdown of the process here: https://www.grc.com/otg/goals.htm https://www.grc.com/otg/goals.htm I hope this makes sense.
- bigmofo 3y ago
  I thought of that (adding a number) when posting, but then one has to remember that number...

groby_b 3y ago

Or... you could just use a password manager. With a few high-value keywords (your email - it's universal password access for most of us!) kept out of it. If you've need additional security (or the feeling thereof), keep it on an IronKey If you think that's not enough because some government or criminal organization is after you - hire somebody who understands security deeply, don't take advice from the Internet :) (Also, threat model: unless you have state-like resources, a state-like attacker will win every time if they want to win. They just don't care about most of us)

syllablehq 3y ago

It makes me so sad that it's 2023 and we haven't fixed passwords. There's no need for any of this. Your email account (+ multi-factor as desired) will always be the weak link, so just reduce everything to that. Get rid of passwords. Create a new standard that falls back to passwords to work with legacy systems, but going forward will enable a password keepers to just authenticate you with a generated random password saved encrypted to your cookies that the user never even has to see. Then reset it as needed through your email (+ multi-factor as desired) as needed. User-visible passwords should die. Technologists should to get un-stuck from living in the current password paradigm. I've been wanting to make this rant a blog post but haven't gotten around to it - esp because I know it's been written about a million times already.

deleted 3y ago
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Longhanks 3y ago
I absolutely despise everything in this comment. I have a user name and I know the associated password, let me in. Leave me alone with your proprietary authenticators that will lock me out the moment I lose my phone or Google/MS just _decide_ they feel like locking me out. GitHub force-disabling password authentication for git push has actively made me contribute less to GitHub-hosted projects. And when I really feel it, I just create a full access authentication token anyway and copy the contents to the device. Great. This is the 90‘s "password on a sticky note at the desk" all over again, just even more cumbersome and even less secure. Great job, everyone. And no, passkeys/webauthn/vendor lock in #1864 won’t fix this.
- syllablehq 3y ago
  I understand where you're coming from, and if you really want to have a username and password - yes, you should be let in. You should always be able to manually authenticate if you really want to. But I'm arguing that's it's time to automate and hide that process from the user experience. (multi-factor auth is another topic... let's put that aside for now..) But the reality is that memorizable passwords simply does not scale in any world where we have to authenticate with so many services. It's time to shift paradigms. When you take a step back, it's clear that we're trying to shim a new password keeper system into an old password input field paradigm, and it makes no sense and it's holding us back. Agreed that no one should be forcing a proprietary authenticator service on anyone. On the contrary, to avoid that, we need an open standard that is cross-compatible between proprietary services. The open standard should make it easy for any browser, password keeper, multi-factor auth system etc to speak the same language and "just work" instead of hacking around with auto-filling password input fields for no reason. We're so stuck in an old way of thinking that we can't see that the password input field is vestigial and is only making everyone's experience worse.

tracker1 3y ago

Then twitter.com becomes X, and you're doomed. Seriously though, I've setup accounts on Site foo, but then bar buys them, and two years later it's on Baz.com, and if I don't remember the switch(es) that woudld/could suck. I just use Bitwarden for everything but my system login(s) and bitwarden passphrase, which I tend to keep around 20 chars, and multiple words.