Password and PIN code strength

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

I came across a xkcd comic once (I hope it was not here, this would be a duplicate, then) and wanted to link it here. It's about password strength.

 

 

I see lots of names here on the forums which are actually no names at all since they look randomly generated. I can imagine lots of you randomly generate your passwords as well. I've also done this in the past, using Kaspersky's Password Manager to store them. One day I downgraded back to Internet Security, and since the only version with the Password Manager is Kaspersky's Total Security Suite, I needed to save all of them. There was no export button so I needed to either change them or write them down. Some were changed, some were written down. And of those I wrote down a few went missing, including the password to my Bitcoin wallet. There was no trying to remember it, it was a 16+ character salad with letters (both uppercase and lowercase, of course), numbers and symbols.

I learned and changed my tactics. I'm now compiling sentences, take the first letter of all words and make a character chain out of them, including all numbers and symbols. The sentences you compile that way heavily rely on what information they contain and how you express yourself, therefore, they contribute to the uniqueness of a password. By taking facts about the website you enter the password to you create unique passwords without the need to directly remember it: Look at the website, remember what you were writing about and you've got your password again.

 

And the PIN codes in the title? I just wanted to link a blog post about PIN number analysis. Interesting read.

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A sentence with 10 words would lead to a 10 character password?  How is that stronger than any other 10 character password?

[OpenSourcerer 1435]

Weak sentence, then. Numbers are written as numbers and symbols are mixed into it. So a 10 word sentence with a relative clause containing a few symbols and numbers as numbers would have 14+ characters. The trick is to be creative and build complex sentences.

 

(Sent via Tapatalk - this generally means I'm not sitting in front of my PC)