Creating, storing and recalling strong passwords is a necessary but painful part of life on the web, but there’s a simple way to do it that’s based on the latest advice from the UK Cyber Security Council, and will allow you to have a complex password that’s unique for each site but easy for you to remember.
We’ve been conditioned to believe that they need to look like this: 7HxB2o#qjEwgl$r, and if you use a password generator that’s the type it will generate but they don’t have to be like that. We’re going to show you how to construct a completely memorable and very secure password.
Common requirements are:
- A mixture of upper and lower case letters
- Numbers
- Special characters
- Minimum length
Step 1
Select THREE memorable words. Don’t use fewer words unless they are long but feel free to use more, if you can remember them.
You need words that are memorable and meaningful, to you. For example, part of an address where you lived as a child, the names of pets, relatives, favourite places, or a mixture. e.g. Mary, Robert, Reading. String them together with a separator such as ‘.’ and make the second letter the capital.
mAry.rObert.rEading.
We have used a mixture of upper and lower case letters and a special character so we’re well on the way. Making the second letter the capital instead of the first, increases the complexity. This is our secret constant which we will use on every site
Step 2
But we still need to add some numbers AND make it unique to the site we use it on. That is very easy to do.
First, take a consistent part of the site name. For the Berkshire Record Office we could use BRO.
Next we need some numbers. We will use two numbers. The first is the calculated as the number of vowels in our three letters and the second is the number of consonants, giving us 12 in this case
The combination of these two with a separator is our secret pattern
The Result
Our password for the BRO site is the combination:
mAry.rObert.rEading.BRO.12
We have a 26 character password that contains mixed case letters, numbers and special characters. The password checkers that we tried predict it would take a computer millions of years to crack it.
Keep it secure
- Don’t write the passwords down
- Don’t write the secret constant down in plain text
- Don’t use our test example!
- If you need a reminder, use something like: my.three.words.3.v.c – you can write that on a post-it note and stick it on your computer and it will only have meaning for you.
