4 ms·
"Good security practices require us to use different passwords for most or all of the websites .... remembering all of your passwords requires an inhuman displa
by mstachowiak 12y ago
"Good security practices require us to use different passwords for most or all of the websites .... remembering all of your passwords requires an inhuman display of memory."
It actually is possible to create unique passwords for every website and remember them without inhuman displays of memory. To do so, there are two basic things you need to remember:
1) A unique base password
2) A simple hashing function
The input to the hashing function can be the company's name or website address (an overly simplified example - your hashing function could be the first two characters of the website's domain name). A unique password for any website could then be:
password = hash_function(domain) + base_password
A very simple way to create unique passwords for every website, inhuman memorization skills not required.
- ig1 12y agoExcept if your password gets compromised on two sites than hackers could identify the pattern and compromise every account you have.
- vially 12y agoYes, but that is also the case if your password manager's password gets compromised.
- aroman 12y agothat's a very very different scenario. your password manager's password is not sent over the wire, and you know it to have very secure hashing. it is stored only on your hardware not so with external websites — if you use the proposed strategy on two websites with poor security (something which is completely opaque to you), your passwords are compromised.
- rsanek 12y agoI used this form for a while but realized that if someone is doing a targeted attack specifically on you and happens to find a single compromised password of yours, all the others are only a few guesses away. It's better than re-using passwords, but still worse than using truly unique ones.
- Spooky23 12y agoIf you're being specifically targeted, the key is accessing your email.