Complex passwords made simple

As passwords become longer and more complicated, creating, and remembering them, is becoming a complication in itself.

Passwords today typically need to be seven to 14 characters long, include at least one keyboard symbol or special character, be alpha-numeric, and also consist of upper and lower case letters.

On top of that, we’re not supposed to write them down, lest someone discovers where they’ve been recorded, nor should they be stored on a computer, or anywhere online, in case someone manages to hack into either of those places.

And while walking a tightrope blindfolded might seem easier, there are a few relatively simple ways to go about devising, and remembering, the “complex” passwords that more system administrators now require.

Eric Myer wrote an article sometime ago about the use of two-word combinations to form passwords, based on a combination of any two words you find easy to remember.

Rather than simply joining these two words together though, the idea is to “interleave” them, thus making two quite simple words into a rather more complicated combination.

The general idea is to pick a two-word combination you can easily remember. For example, suppose you’re a big fan of pizza and Pepsi, and would have no trouble remembering those words. Perfect: use them the basis of your password. No, you don’t make it “pizzaPepsi” – instead, you interleave the words. That would yield “pPiezpzsai”. It looks fairly random, and yet is very easy to recreate because the seed words are so easy to remember.

While that’s quite helpful, how about systems that require symbols (special characters), upper and lower case letters, as well as numbers? That begins to leave rather a lot to commit to memory.

To get around this I’ve devised a way of creating passwords, based on Eric Myer’s two-word combination idea, that “tell a story”, or at least a short story. Here’s how I might create a password using Eric’s combinations of pizza and pepsi.

First, I’d make up some “story” involving these words, say, “money for pizza and pepsi in March”.

It’s short and simple, is fairly easy to memorise, and could even be written down if need be, as such a phrase will make little sense to anyone else who sees it.

The word money becomes a mnemonic for the $, or currency, symbol on your keyboard, while March, as in the month, becomes a memory aid for the numbers 03 (March being the third month of the year).

Once we have applied some upper case letters to the combination, your password could look like this: $PizzaPepsi03

Assign a word you can remember to keyboard symbols. For example @ could mean “at”, ! could mean “hey!”, or ? could stand for “what?”

What about pizza and pepsi for lunch? could become ?PizzaPepsi13 if lunch is at 1pm, or 1300 hours, on the 24 hour clock. It’s all a matter of working out some basic conventions known only to yourself.

Of course “real words” shouldn’t be used in passwords either, which pizza and pepsi (depending whose dictionary you are reading) are, but some interleaving will resolve this.

For instance you could swap the first and last letters of your two-word combination, producing ?AizzpIepsp13, which makes the password a little more complex, but still easy to recall provided you don’t forget your password creation conventions.