Xref: utzoo comp.unix.questions:8063 comp.misc:2750 Path: utzoo!utgpu!water!watmath!clyde!att!osu-cis!killer!richardh From: richardh@killer.UUCP (Richard Hargrove) Newsgroups: comp.unix.questions,comp.misc Subject: genrating secure passwords (was Re: Password choices) Summary: here's another method Keywords: passwords password generation Message-ID: <4751@killer.UUCP> Date: 9 Jul 88 14:34:29 GMT Organization: The Unix(R) Connection, Dallas, Texas Lines: 27 Most of the articles posted so far have discussed the ways of generating bad passwords. Since at any given point in time I may have to be able to log into as many as 20 different systems (each with a different password of course; you wouldn't dare use the same password across multiple systems would you? :-), I use a variant on the method suggested by the CompuServe adminstrators. Their suggestion is to form your password fromwhere word1 and word2 are unrelated. The idea is that since the password has semantic content, it will be easier to remember. Obviously this method is easily varied (no I'm not going to tell you what my variation is :-). For generating many, vaguely related passwords, the choices for the words can come from two classes of words (example: sports and flowers - "Sailing;Rose"). While the example lists two noun classes, verb or adjective classes may be used also. Minor variations in the words of a base password can then be used to generate closely related password groups (i.e. - "sail;Roses"). This method can be used to generate clusters of passwords that you can use with password aging systems. Hope this helps others avoid the "Oh, no! What password am I using on this system." syndrome. richard hargrove ...!{ihnp4 | codas | cbosgd}!killer!richardh --------------------------------------------