Personal Encryption - How I remember over 400 unique passwords
People frequently ask me about creating secure passwords. Normally the question starts as with a question like “How do you keep track of all of your passwords?”.
Well, I think the underlying question many of them are really asking is “I’d feel better if I knew that you also use the same password for everything just as I do, do you?”
No, of course not. I see that as a security risk. If all my passwords were the same then once someone had one password all of them could be cracked. To answer the question directly, I use Apple’s Keychain Application to store passwords… all 454 of them and counting.
Just using the Keychain itself makes remembering passwords easier. When you register for an account on most websites Keychain will ask you if you would like to have it remember the password for you. You can easily create random passwords (and usernames) that Keychain will remember for you.
But even without Keychain I can probably recall over 400 of the 454 passwords; and they are almost all unique. They key is to create your own custom encryption method that you can apply almost anywhere. It isn’t as difficult as it sounds. Let me give a few examples and then you can create your own personal encryption method.
Let’s say I wanted to create a userame and password for ebay. Just for the sake of making unique passwords and usernames, I could call my username tim_yabe. (yabe is ebay backwards.) So now I have a unique username.
For a password, let’s take the word ebay, Let’s put my month of birth before the word and my day of birth after the word. So now we have 01ebay24. And for good measure let’s make the next to the last letter capitalized. My personal encrypted password would now be 01ebAy24.
Let’s try the same method with another website, Amazon. Using the personal encryption method outlined above what would the username and password be?
If you said tim_nozama for a username and 01amazOn24 as the password, you’ve mastered personal encryption.
Now, the key here is to create your own personal encryption method rather than using this example. Here are some examples of how you can incorporate personal encryption into your own account creation techniques.
- Switch “look-alike” letters and numbers. l becomes 1. 0 becomes O. B becomes 8. L becomes 7.
- Strip out all vowels or all consonants. Amazon becomes mzn or aao.
- Switch the case of all vowels. aMaZoN.
The possibilities are endless. The key is that you don’t need to really remember your passwords. Now it is certainly possible that someone who knows one of my passwords might be able to reverse engineer my encryption technique. However this is more secure than using the same username and/or password everywhere in which case no reverse engineering would even be necessary.
Just pick a personal encryption technique and stick to it. When you come to a login window you will just need to think of your encryption technique to decrypt your credentials from your brain.
Tim Flight
Personal Encryption Methods for Passwords