I am sure that most of you guys have dozens of passwords for different websites. Blogs, hosting plans, social networking sites, online services, forums, you name it. The problem is to remember what password is for what website (and using the same one all over the place would be crazy for security reasons).
A first solution is to use a password manager, as I recommended in the past. However, even using that I often end up losing passwords. This happens when I forget to sync my database of passwords between different computers, for example.
To solve this problem I am starting to use a technique to be able to know all my passwords automatically. How? By creating an algorithm to create the passwords.
Here is one example:
- The first digit is the number of characters on the name of the website.
- The second digit is “c” is the number in the first step was odd, and “t” if it was even.
- The third digit is the last letter of the name of the website.
- The fourth digit is “$” if the letter in the previous step was a vowel, and “%” if it was a consonant.
- The last three digits are the first three letters of the name of the website.
Using the algorithm above, your password on Twitter would be “7cr%twi” and on Facebook it would be “8tk%fac”.
Once you start using the algorithm to create your passwords you will be able to remember any password by applying it again. Obviously the important thing is to make sure no one knows what your algorithm is (and that the algorithm is slightly complex).
