Creating Rememberable Passwords

There are many sites available online where one needs to provide a password or passcode. With the advent of e-mail, passwords became an integral part of our e-life. They not only protect our privacy but also our identity on the internet. But with the evolution of security systems, we also see an increase in sophistication of password hacking / cracking tools. So, we need to make our passwords as ‘strong‘ as possible. Are the passwords that we normally use strong enough. A trip to the password checker will give a better idea. So, how do I make a strong password?

Microsoft has given a good explanation. Wikipedia has taken a dig on this here.  Cryptosmith is another site which gives more information on the issue. One can also make use of random password generators.

These sites give you enough information only on how to create a strong password. Now, you may ask, “I’ve got a great password that follows all the rules that strong passwords must follow. It’s the most obscure alphanumeric sequence containing all funny symbols. And on top of it, it’s bigger than the topic of my latest business meet. So, how the heck am I supposed to remember it?“.

So, I’ve invented a great way to increase the obscurity to your old passwords, thus making them a bit stronger. For this we use a convert the original rememberable password into an obscure one. This is particularly helpful as most password hackers use tools with a ‘dictionary‘, that checks for day to day words like names, places, nicknames, etc.

For this post I’m only using a substitution on the text matter of a password.

Let us take a long phrase as a password – SanketIsAGoodPasswordHacker. Now this phrase consists general words – is a good password hacker, and a name – Sanket. This password is very easy to crack. So, we need to substitute each letter with another to increase obscurity.

For this, we’ll need a phrase which has all the letters of our password. Now pangrams can be very useful in this respect as they contain all the letters of the alphabet. A good list of pangrams can be found here.

I’m chosing this pangram as it’s the most known one – The quick brown fox jumps over the lazy dog. We’ll start  substituting each letter from this pangram with the alphabet. A repetition may have different letters. A space may increment our sequence. It all depends upon you. For this article, I’m using it without considering spaces or repetitions. Deleting the repetitions and spaces, we get – thequickbrownfxjmpsvlazydg. We, now substitute the alphabet for each letter.

Thus,
T becomes A, H becomes B, E becomes C, Q becomes D,
U becomes E, I becomes F, C becomes G, K becomes H,
B becomes I, R becomes J, O becomes K, W becomes L,
N becomes M, F becomes N, X becomes O, J becomes P,
M becomes Q, P becomes R, S becomes S, V becomes T,
L becomes U, A becomes V, Z becomes W, Y becomes X
D becomes Y, G becomes Z

Thus our phrase

SanketIsAGoodPasswordHacker becomes
SvmhcaFsVZkkyRvsslkjyBvghcj or by reverse substitution
StfouvBsTCxxqJtsszxpqKteoup.

Now, SvmhcaFsVZkkyRvsslkjyBvghcj or StfouvBsTCxxqJtsszxpqKteoup are very difficult to crack compared to SanketIsAGoodPasswordHacker.

And it’s also eazy to remember this password if you remember the pangram.

One can experiment with a number of pangrams and phrases to make different combinations. A password for a site could be easily made by transforming the sitename using this technique. Thus a wordpress password may become lkjyrjcss or zxpqjpuss which is not only difficult to crack but also easy to remember.

I’ve explored only the area for substituting text here. If I get a good response for this article, I’ll post another about numbers and special characters.

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