IT 475

1
IT 475

• SELECTING GOOD PASSWORDS

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Why?

• Make it as difficult as possible for a cracker to
  make a good guess about what your password
  choice.
• Let the person use a brute-force technique to
  crack your password.
• Let the person use a program to try every
  combination of letters, numbers and punctuation
  characters. Might take them a while (Like years)!

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What Not To Use

• Dont use your login name in any form (as is,
  reversed, capitalized, doubled)
• Dont use your first or last name in any form.
• Dont use your spouses name or your childs
  name.
• Dont use other information easily obtained about
  you (license plate numbers, telephone numbers,
  ssn, brand of your car, street on which you live).

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What Not To Use

• Dont use a password of all digits, or the same
  letter. This significantly decreases the search
  time for a cracker.
• Dont use a word contained in (English or a
  foreign language) dictionaries, spelling lists,
  or other lists of words.
• Dont use a password shorter than six characters.

5
What To Use

• Do use a password with mixed-case alphabetic
  characters.
• Do use a password with nonalphabetic characters,
  e.g., digits or punctuation.
• Do use a password that is easy to remember, so
  you dont have to write it down.

6
What To Use

• Do use a password that you can type quickly,
  without having to look at the keyboard. This
  makes it harder for someone to steal your
  password by watching over your shoulder.

7
Method to Choose Secure and Easy to Remember
Passwords

• Choose a line or two from a song or poem, and use
  the first letter of each word.
• E.g. In Xanadu did Kubla Kahn a stately
  pleasure dome decree becomes IXdKKaspdd.

8
Method to Choose Secure and Easy to Remember
Passwords

• Alternate between one consonant and one or two
  vowels, up to eight characters.
• This provides nonsense words that are usually
  pronounceable, and thus easily remembered.
• E.g. routboo, quadpop, etc.

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Method to Choose Secure and Easy to Remember
Passwords

• Choose two short words and concatenate them
  together with a punctuation character between
  them.
• E.g. dograin, bookmug, kid?goat.