7 ms·

This is how I come up with passwords; I find a phrase that I can remember without too much trouble then I use the first letter of each word to make a password.

This is how I come up with passwords; I find a phrase that I can remember without too much trouble then I use the first letter of each word to make a password. Phrase: Three Rings for the Elven-kings under the sky, Seven for the Dwarf-lords in their halls of stone Password: 3RftE-kuts,7ftD-lithos Easy to remember and highly secure. I have been using this method for years. Bonus example: Four score and seven years ago our fathers brought forth on this continent, a new nation, conceived in Liberty 4sasyaofbfotc,ann,ciL Less secure then the last example but still strong. Especially if you use uncommon strings like the words to a song by a local band or a phrase from the newspaper or an unpopular book. That way even an attack targeting this method will take a long long time.

kragen 15y ago
This is probably not as secure as the xkcd scheme if you don't make up the phrase yourself. See my comment above with calculations about a variant of this scheme. I suspect that both of your example phrases are among the million most quoted phrases in the English language, giving them entropy of under 20 bits.
rubberbandage 15y ago
This is the same method Apple officially recommended in their help for choosing a secure password—the example they gave was “Tnf,tfws95” (“That’s not flying, that’s falling with style”) followed by the year of Toy Story’s release (where the quote is from). I agree that it’s an excellent combo of passphrase and obfuscation. Unfortunately, their documentation now[1] gives the same kind of example that XKCD points out will be exceedingly difficult to remember correctly. [1] http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1506 http://support.apple.com/kb/HT1506